Graduation is coming, looking to get a laptop.

No. I'm in engineering and almost none of our programs are supported on macs.

What I've noticed is:

Math and science: PC

Liberal arts: Mac

not to second guess your career decision.

my father, and lots of his commercial pilot friends would tell you to major in something that actually has a marketable use outside of aviation.

good on you for not going to UND or embrey riddle or some expensive flight school, and doing it the cheapest way possible. it will make being a regional FO that much easier.

but again, look into getting a 2 year accounting degree or something like that/

Ahh mental mistake. I meant design/art. My ex was an engineering major and the program she was in required a PC.

he's getting some kind of business degree too. he has his shit figured out

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Macintrash

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What programs are you using?

I find it hard to believe.

Either way I know for a fact that in math/science macs are used extensively. All of my profs have macbooks.

How many PC's do you see in this picture? I see just the one in front and it's almost guaranteed to be running linux.

and what were you doing on excel that the macbooks supposedly couldn't handle?

There is just no way a cheap laptop will do anything in excel faster than a $2000 macbook. I don't have excel because I don't need office software but I guarantee you my macbook could do whatever it was you needed to do in that class.

And I guarantee you from seeing it first hand, close to every student in class was forced to go to computer labs or rent/borrow PC's for projects. The macs would run it so goddamn slow it wasn't worth the hassle. And I know of several people who properly partitioned their Mac and still ended up using pc's

you never answered either question. what programs are you using for engineering that don't run on macs, and what were you doing in excel that a mac couldn't handle?

The engineering comment was someone else. As far as excel and Access, you can do the very basic data entries fine, but when you get into several worksheets all connected with nested if functions for example, it gets slow as hell on a Mac to the point where you don't want to bother even using it.

Oh sorry about that.

I dunno, I just still can't believe this. If it was someone trying to run like a mac version of office I could believe it because I have no idea if excel for mac is slow or something.

But running windows on metal on a macbook shouldn't be any different than on a pc with the same components. Not for something like excel at least. I admit I am having problems with graphics switching on linux and doing something like CAD might be slower (although really if you have it set up with just the gpu it should be just as fast, just worse for battery life), but in linux my programs can get ahold of the 4 cores and the 8 gigs of ram. It number crunches just as fast. I don't see why it would be any different in windows (other than the slightly shitter OS slowing things down).

Either way in science you probably wont be working with big spreadsheets in excel, so it doesn't matter. You can get Matlab/Octave/SciLab and Mathematica/Maple/Maxima/Sage. origin and sigma plot are basically the only standard programs that are windows-only and qtiplot is comparable enough to suit any undergraduate student. Mac/Unix has always been very popular in academia and almost everything is cross-platform. Linux might have more packages but you can get almost everything running on OSX if you want to use a shitty OS. I'm doing it right now.

Basically it's the same shit. I just feel sorry for anyone who has to pay for windows or office. Thank god I don't have to. LibreOffice would suit any needs I ever have although I think I have used it like twice in the past year.

HAHAAH

haha case and point, odds are it's pretty old too, it's only being used for the powerpoint on the screen behind him

I dunno if it's probably old. It probably doesn't have powerpoint on it though. I think CERN would shell out for decent hardware, but I highly doubt they would pay for an MS office license when there are open source alternatives that would work better for them.

in the real world you have to.

I go to Indiana University, and EVERYBODY has a Macbook. Period end of story.  I had the money to buy one, but there is just no need for one.  I went out on black friday and waited outside best buy for a couple hours over night after thanskgiving dinner and got a Lenovo Laptop for $199 plus tax and shit. And it works perfect and does everything I need it tool

wtf? are you saying CERN isn't part of the real world?

I have no idea why in the real world you would HAVE to buy a proprietary office suite. I understand that a lot of people use an office suite for work. I don't understand why it would need to be microsoft office.

I'm in university, not the "real world", but I use my computer almost everyday for schoolwork and I have never felt the need to purchase ms office. I've barely even needed to use libre office. Maybe a handful of times because of people (stuck in 1999) who distribute files as .doc or .ppt

There are a lot of people who just don't need office software and there are even more who just don't need to pay hundreds of dollars for it.

Get a Shuttle.

I used to game, built my own pc back in '04 which can now be built at 1/3 the money I spent.

Shuttle is super portable with the exception of the monitor. I don't know what actual laptops are good for gaming since they are so handy but will also lack and cost way more $$ if you want some better components that will last you years rather than a laptop that will be "outdated" for certain aspects of gaming in 3 years.

because freeware does not scale to enterprise level

I never said anything about freeware.

did you mean free software and/or open source? If so I hope you are joking. Open source software is a multi billion dollar industry and is frequently implemented at the enterprise level. overall linux dominates the market share by a huge margin.

my macbook pro is the best coin i have ever dropped