Is a macbook right for me?

[YoungGun21]

I'm going to be a senior in high school this year. I'm looking to get my laptop for college purchased ahead of time so that I don't have to worry about it later on and the expense will already be out of the way. I'm either going to be majoring in actuarial science or an engineering discipline and I was wondering if the programs (MATLAB, etc) I'll be using worked fine on Macs or if they had some trouble? I know there is an Office for Mac, but I want to make sure all the programs work so that I don't have to use it for something and then have a major :facepalm: moment.

I've always thought a Mac would be nice and with the new deal they have I could get that Touch that I've been wanting for free.

 

[Kaido]

Don't forget, you can dual-boot with Windows on a Mac, so you can easily turn it into a run-of-the-mill windows laptop at the drop of a hat

You can also use a virtual machine to run certain applications. For example, I don't like Office for Mac, so I use Crossover Mac with Office XP instead :thumbsup:

 

[mmntech]

Macs offer the best battery life for full sized laptops so they're ideal for college. Like Kaido said, you can use Windows on it as well using Bootcamp. The White model would be a good choice since the price is a little more student friendly. As for office programs, I'd use either OpenOffice or its derivative NeoOffice. Some people don't like the open source alternatives, others swear by them. I'm part of the latter and I have a massive pile of class notes and essays to back it up.

 

[TheStu]

Apple has run the same 'back to school' promotion every summer for the past like 4 years or something. Trust me, get your laptop before you go to college, tech will improve in the next year. This time last year, the cheapest MacBook was $1199, had less RAM and a smaller hard drive, I think a 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo, and the intel x3100.

Wait until next year to get it. Worst case scenario, the white macbook won't exist anymore and all that will be left will be the $1299 unibody macbook (oh the horror!) which will bne a year better in specs.

However, if you are dead set on getting it this year, wait until about August or September, before the deal ends, but give Apple as long as possible to possibly speed bump again. The White MacBook is a killer system for $999.

If you are going to be in college, I HIGHLY recommend having Office installed. OpenOffice is nice, I guess. I have both Office and iWork installed, so I have no use for OpenOffice and was never very impressed by it anyway. Install Office, you get guaranteed compatibility, certainly more so than with iWork or OpenOffice. This is not a slight against OpenOffice, so much as the fact that you want to make sure that your professors and fellow classmates see the exact same thing that you saw when you wrote your paper.

I switched to Mac before starting my Software Engineering work. It wasn't too bad for me, but unless MatLab for OS X has improved in the past few years, then you want to run the Windows version, either via VMWare or BootCamp.

 

[rdp6]

Mathworks sent to me an evaluation copy of MATLAB in early 2007, but it didn't come with any of toolboxes which were available on the university's pcs. I needed the controls and symbolic math toolboxes for some EE stuff, so eventually I ran MATLAB in windows. It's plenty fast in a vm, especially if you are careful with your programs and use the profiler. Also, tic and toc are handy.

Truth be told I had half of my undergrad stuff done with apps on windows, so I continued to use windows until the end for reports. Sometimes you are stuck with a university machine anyways, esp in the labs where your data acquisition, scopes, and PIC programming devices are already set up for you, and invariably these machines run windows.

Have you considered that if you get your laptop now that your battery will likely have substantially reduced operation time by Fall 2010?

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

Matlab does come with a mac version. It also does come out with a linux version.

 

[TheStu]

Originally posted by: ChAoTiCpInOy
Matlab does come with a mac version. It also does come out with a linux version.

Yes, but at least in lat 06, early 07, the mac version was crap since it wasn't a native app.

 

[BriGy86]

I would stick to a PC and possibly wait for windows 7 to come out. Entourage (which replaces outlook in office for Mac) isn't all that great when connecting to exchange and the only other things you get in office for Mac is Word, Excel, and Power Point. So if you need any other office apps like Access you're SOL on the Mac. If there are any web based apps they may only function in IE (The latest version on Mac is IE5 I believe and isn't supported anymore.) As for dual booting windows on the Mac if that's the plan you might as well save some money and just purchase a Windows machine anyway.

And if you get the right kind of laptop you can load OS X on it anyway

 

[Gooberlx2]

Originally posted by: TheStu
you want to make sure that your professors and fellow classmates see the exact same thing that you saw when you wrote your paper.

I've started using the pdf export function in OpenOffice for that. Now, with the slight discrepancies between 2007's and 2003's formats (docx vs doc), you can't always guarantee perfection between the versions, or that someone has the know-how to install the conversion tool in 2003.

Since our lab uses linux (and thus openoffice), and the rest of the institution is using windows/office....I at least know everyone is using a pdf reader of some kind.

 

[sourceninja]

Originally posted by: BriGy86
I would stick to a PC and possibly wait for windows 7 to come out. Entourage (which replaces outlook in office for Mac) isn't all that great when connecting to exchange and the only other things you get in office for Mac is Word, Excel, and Power Point. So if you need any other office apps like Access you're SOL on the Mac. If there are any web based apps they may only function in IE (The latest version on Mac is IE5 I believe and isn't supported anymore.) As for dual booting windows on the Mac if that's the plan you might as well save some money and just purchase a Windows machine anyway.

And if you get the right kind of laptop you can load OS X on it anyway

Most universities and colleges are very mac friendly. Most don't use exchange (at least not any of the one's I've visited when doing research for how my college should proceed). Access is a horrible horrible thing that should never be used ever.

I'd say more than 20% of our student body use macs judging by google analytics. Most of them using firefox. So when we design our web apps, we use that as a guideline which means full mac support. On top of that, one of the largest education software vendors SunGard supports safari, opera, firefox, and IE.

The only microsoft apps really required on our campus are word and excel. And then only for the few professors that simply do not want to learn anything new and use open office to view student work. Of course if you are taking our C++ classes then you are learning on Visual Studio, and that could be a concern. Otherwise for the most part our instructors do most everything though moodle and luminus. Both of which support mac just fine. There are some exceptions such as classes that use autocad. But that is no different then our design labs being all macs.

I had a few friends recently graduate from ND and they were all mac users (well one was a linux user) and had no issues to report.

On top of that, most colleges and universities have licenses to sell Microsoft software very cheap. So I always suggest to my students to pick up a copy of windows for $10.00 at the bookstore just in case they come across a need for it. Then run it in virtualbox or vmware.

 

[RandomFool]

You'd probably be fine with a Mac. Any software issues you run into can be solved by dual-booting Windows or visiting the computer labs. A friend of mine used a Mac (art student) and she didn't have many issues although she did need to come over to borrow people's PCs occasionally.

With Apple it's generally always better to hold off on buying until you need it since they like to sneak little upgrades in here and there. They just updated the screens on the MacBook like two weeks ago and about a month or two before that they switched the white MacBook to the nvidia 9400 GPU.

 

[YoungGun21]

Alright I guess I'll hold off to see what kinds of deals and upgrades they throw in next year. I didn't know Apple updated their computers so often, I thought it was just once or twice a year.

I wanted to wait to see what the Zune HD is like anyway

 

[RandomFool]

Apple usually does major updates every other year, smaller announced updates twice a year, and random un-announced updates throughout.

ZuneHD looks pretty cool. I'm toyingwith the idea of getting a new iPhone with like 4 gigs of space and then the ZuneHD 32GB as a media player.

 

[tokie]

Matlab on Mac sucks terribly. It runs through X11 and has bad fonts (compared to the rest of OS X) and some odd bugs. Definitely run the Windows version in a VM or something.