Are MacBooks a good choice for students?

Question

Are MacBooks an option that students should contemplate for their school requirements?

Answer 1

Apple’s MacBooks make an exceptional option for students owing to the quality construction, good battery life, quiet fans, and high performance. Unfortunately, they often come at a high cost, especially with the costs of upgrades, and certain software, mainly AAA games and the use of Linux, are not too well supported.

Comments

If you go into engineering, absolutely DO NOT buy an Apple laptop. Many engineering applications do not run on them, the best example of which is solidworks.

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If you're in Finance, stay away from a Mac. Finance classes often teach Excel based on PC shortcuts. You'd like to think it's just a simple swap of the Ctrl key for the Cmd Key but it's not. You WILL be lost.

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I finished university about a month ago but I just wanted to say DO NOT get a MacBook Air if you are planning to use Excel. The app crashes frequently, can't handle large datasets, lacks certain features and the shortcuts are really confusing. I literally had to use my old windows laptop to submit my assignments because my mac couldn't upload documents on safari or chrome.

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If you're going into molecular biology, pharmacology, biochemistry or bioinformatics, x86 Windows is the only option. There are so many programs (particularly lab equipment-specific software from like the early 2000s) that simply will not run on anything else. Also if you're doing any sort of genomic or data work, CUDA is extremely useful and only available on x86 devices with nvidia GPUs.

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I saw someone commenting on engineering softwares not running on mac. As a computer engineering student with an M1 Mac I can add my experience to that. First off, you can run Windows on ARM using a VM but the only way of the experience being minimally usable is for the engineering software to have a Windows ARM version, which almost all don't.

Softwares I had troubles with:
Softwares with limited functionality compared to Windows: LTSpice, Autocad, Visual Studio, Excel, Matlab

Softwares unavailable on mac: SolidWorks, PTC Creo, Altium, PSPice, Intel Quartus Prime, Mikro C for Pic

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If you study architecture or anything engineering, forget about using a mac, unless the specific field you study won't require anything that doesn't run on it. I've researched into getting a cheaper gaming desktop with sufficient processing power, and then get a tablet like the S9 FE to mirror the screen, it's much lighter, the battery lasts longer, and it's great for taking notes, then rendering when needed, just connect to the pc. In the long run it's cheaper as you can upgrade the pc, the only downside is a bit of latency for the mirroring. This of course will be a bit more expensive at first, but you never risk damaging your main machine because of spills and drops on the go, had to learn that the hard way, and every project i was working on was also lost.

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Do not buy a Mac if you are studying finance or something that will frequently use Excel/ MS Office. It has limited functionality and all of your courses will follow windows shortcuts and assume windows features.

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I will be studying computer science however I am really leaning towards the new surface laptops

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A MacBook Pro with an M2 Pro and 16 GB RAM and 1 TB storage is the best laptop choice for students. You probably have to install Parallels VM with Windows so you can run Windows-only software. Software such as Solidworks will run in the VM. Not sure about games; if gaming is important, then maybe not Apple. Otherwise, the weight, size, battery life, and ecosystem are worth the cost.