What laptop is your kid taking to college?
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Anonymous
We got our dd a Dell in August of last year. It ran an update the first week in December that disabled he built in keyboard. This was during finals week. Luckily we found a work around by plugging in an external keyboard to get her through finals. The computer was still under warranty. DH spent 4 hours on the phone with the help desk at Dell trying to fix the issue. Dell then had us ship the computer back to them with assurances that it would be fixed and sent back to us in 10 business days. It took them 3 months and the computer they sent back was not ours but rather a different refurbished laptop. In the meantime we had to buy our dd another new computer for her to take back to college for second semester. We will never buy another Dell. The same week that this happened to our dd my work laptop (also a Dell) ran an update that disabled part of my motherboard. Since this is a company computer it is covered under a different level of warranty that included a Dell technician coming out to fix it. He told me he has at least 40 repairs a week like this and that his family will never own a Dell computer. |
Anonymous
I am not impugning Macs. I am just saying that there are some university engineering programs that tell students not to buy a Mac. |
Anonymous
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Watch memory/storage capacity.
If your kid will be doing a lot of work that requires special software (digital design/statistics/coding/science/big data analysis), then make sure to get the model with more space. We did not, and now my kid has to upgrade. She actually also wishes she had two monitors or at least a bigger ones because she deals with a lot of genetic data. So, consider the field when you choose. |
Anonymous
| MacBook Pro |
Anonymous
My mac-hating kid will say the same, but his homebuilt PC and gamer laptop keep breaking down, and he asks to borrow my 8-year-old mac. 
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Anonymous
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A laptop with pen input, like Lenovo Yoga C940.
My DC is a 1st year student majoring in physical science. She is staying in the dorms, with most classes remote. She told me that for homework and tests, they have to show their work, meaning writing rows and rows of equations often containing greek and mathematic symbols that are not on a keyboard. Many students do their work on paper, then scan and upload their assignment. TA's feedback from grading early assignments is the scans are sometimes not clear... thin or light lines disappeared, etc. They're told to re-copy homework neatly using use a fat pen. That takes extra time out of a student's already busy schedule. With a 2-in-1 laptop (ie laptop convertible to tablet), my daughter can "write" her homework right on the screen, knowing the image on her screen is what the graders will see. And she doesn't need access to a scanner. |
Anonymous
| buy it through the school and that way if they need any service they are part of the program there and get loaners if needed. All school programs are loaded on it and your 529 will cover it |
Anonymous
I call BS. Citation or it doesn’t exist. If you really need to run something on Windows you run VirtualBox. Apple M1 is better for * creative stuff * research and paper writing * software development * running Jupyter for simple data and stats stuff (any of conda macports or home brew will work here, since you don’t need the optimized linear algebra libraries for student work) * machine learning (M1 is scarily close to GPU performance) The power efficiency is also just a killer feature for someone who may not plug in much during the day. |
Anonymous
That’s what I thought, was but my computational bio kid insists that since her (ecological/evolutionary modeling) work has to be run on the university’s high performance system, her desktop/laptop is basically just a terminal anyway for heavy-duty stuff. |
Anonymous
assuming the programs you need have been ported and work as well ported as they do natively. I'd get an intel Mac and be confident, there is no way I'd touch an M1 if they may have to use obscure or proprietary software in school |
Anonymous
good luck getting virtual box to run on an m1. just google it, the results aren't great |
Anonymous
Yes, there are engineering departments that have specifications on the computers the students need to have. In general, there are much more engineering softwares for windows based PC than for Macs. |
Anonymous
| In general, to run a virtual machine on an mac is not a fun to begin with. It is also very slow. |
Anonymous
My sons engineering school said if you already had a Mac you did not have to replace it but it you were buying some thing new you should not buy one. I think there was some software that was better..but it was available in the computer lab too. Both my kids brought Dell Laptops (no idea which) to college and have had no issues. We do not own anything Apple so it was not an issue for us. |
Anonymous
| I asked computational bio DD and her reaction was Dell XPS. Likes her friend’s 15”, but said she’d probably prefer 13.” |