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Laptop for college freshman- Macbook?
Posted on 7/23/26 at 10:11 am
Posted on 7/23/26 at 10:11 am
I've got a college freshman and I'm looking to get them a new computer. I don't know a thing about Mac's, but it seems like that is what they all use these days. Education major, so I can't imagine any big computer power needed. Good to go with a Neo? Or is it worth it to go with the Air?
4
Posted on 7/23/26 at 10:36 am to Kingpenm3
I'd probably lean iPad Pro with a pencil unless the program specifically requires a laptop
Posted on 7/23/26 at 10:52 am to Kingpenm3
Dell XPS 13
quote:
XPS 13 arrives at its most accessible price ever, contending with the MacBook Neo on price, and exceeding it on features.
At 1kg and remarkably thin, the XPS 13 is the thinnest and lightest XPS laptop ever made.
Posted on 7/23/26 at 11:16 am to LemmyLives
Stay away from Dell. We supply all of our tehnicians laptops. We once went went Dell - never again. Slowest, most unusable laptop on the market.
Posted on 7/23/26 at 1:08 pm to Kingpenm3
The general consensus is, do not get a Mac unless you are hell bent on being an Apple person.
The professional adult world is Windows based, so it is best to get comfortable with that environment.
The professional adult world is Windows based, so it is best to get comfortable with that environment.
Posted on 7/23/26 at 1:10 pm to DarthRebel
Adding. I am going with Lenovo for my college freshman.
Do not over think it, nor over spend.
Do not over think it, nor over spend.
Posted on 7/23/26 at 2:49 pm to DarthRebel
Mac are great if you are not planning on ever using it for math or need to use the higher functions of the Microsoft Suite.
If they are looking at any STEM field or Business, I would avoid Macs like the plague. Education is somewhat an easier use case, but they have some heavy writing/group work needs. I would still avoid a Mac, but not the end of the world.
As a side note, this is one of the most difficult things I deal with at the University. Too many students have Macs, and they either have to use VM or the computer labs to be able to do many of my more technical assignments.
If they are looking at any STEM field or Business, I would avoid Macs like the plague. Education is somewhat an easier use case, but they have some heavy writing/group work needs. I would still avoid a Mac, but not the end of the world.
As a side note, this is one of the most difficult things I deal with at the University. Too many students have Macs, and they either have to use VM or the computer labs to be able to do many of my more technical assignments.
This post was edited on 7/23/26 at 2:52 pm
Posted on 7/23/26 at 3:36 pm to laxtonto
Ok, thank you all for talking me away from the mac world. They'll be getting a pc after all.
My oldest ended up having to finally run to BB and get a $250 pc when she finally found something that just couldn't get done on her mac.
quote:
As a side note, this is one of the most difficult things I deal with at the University. Too many students have Macs, and they either have to use VM or the computer labs to be able to do many of my more technical assignments.
My oldest ended up having to finally run to BB and get a $250 pc when she finally found something that just couldn't get done on her mac.
Posted on 7/23/26 at 8:25 pm to Kingpenm3
quote:
They'll be getting a pc after all.
My GF's daughter is going to college next year. If she wants a Mac, I can't help her. I'm piloting a Mint installation on an old laptop which should work, but it's a project to configure a way to VPN into it so I can run update manager for her.
Windows, it's forcing the update, and rebooting on it's own. All I need to do is make sure she saves everything in Onedrive with auto-save enabled, etc.
Posted on 7/23/26 at 8:59 pm to Kingpenm3
Not sure why folks are downvoting me but theres a good chance you will be getting asked to buy an iPad Pro sooner rather than later. Dealt with this with for dental school, pre med major and now education major. I just bought one for the education major, just got them a 12" pro for sophmore year. School is death by powerpoint and its a lot easier to mark up existing powerpoints that type a bunch of stuff in the notes area.
Personally I do not care for apple stuff and I think that Windows tablets are far more superior at being able to take notes and shink the sizes of so of the obnoxiously large powerpoints we were given, but most people do not care about such abilities.
If your person/kid/etc. knows a second year student at the school were they are going, it may help to seek their advice. Laptops may be more beneficial for testing, they may be required. But if its really for taking notes, a lot of people find marking up slides far easier. Just FYI.
Personally I do not care for apple stuff and I think that Windows tablets are far more superior at being able to take notes and shink the sizes of so of the obnoxiously large powerpoints we were given, but most people do not care about such abilities.
If your person/kid/etc. knows a second year student at the school were they are going, it may help to seek their advice. Laptops may be more beneficial for testing, they may be required. But if its really for taking notes, a lot of people find marking up slides far easier. Just FYI.
Posted on 7/23/26 at 10:01 pm to laxtonto
quote:
If they are looking at any STEM field
That's idiotic and you don't work in STEM. Go to any software engineering conference and it's 99% macs because everything is kube, and kube runs natively on macs.
You are literally lying to this dude. I get it, she's gonna be a teacher so it doesn't matter that much, but you are just blatantly wrong.
Posted on 7/24/26 at 8:14 am to j1897
Calm down, Francis. Kube runs just fine on Windows through a number of methods. There is, however, a difference in the processing power and RAM of the average Mac that gets bought by a non tech savvy parent. They're not speccing out a machine with a Radeon Pro in it, they're getting what is on sale at Costco. The Macbook Neo, for instance, has less RAM in it than my current GPU.
Posted on 7/24/26 at 2:05 pm to LemmyLives
The XPS slop you keep posting has 8gb as well dude. What kind of argument is that?
"that laptop sucks, it has 8gb of ram, buy this laptop instead, it has 8gb of ram"
Huh? The model you are suggesting also has a freaking wildcat lake proc that is absolute arse. I get it, you don't like macs, but at least be genuine with your recommendations.
**Also kube on windows is crap because you have to run it through hyper-v, it's a ram hog when ram is at all time high pricing. Yes, i am correct, it runs natively on a mac, not on windows.
"that laptop sucks, it has 8gb of ram, buy this laptop instead, it has 8gb of ram"
Huh? The model you are suggesting also has a freaking wildcat lake proc that is absolute arse. I get it, you don't like macs, but at least be genuine with your recommendations.
**Also kube on windows is crap because you have to run it through hyper-v, it's a ram hog when ram is at all time high pricing. Yes, i am correct, it runs natively on a mac, not on windows.
This post was edited on 7/24/26 at 2:07 pm
Posted on 7/24/26 at 3:50 pm to j1897
Students can experiment with Kubernetes and all sorts of other fun toys but as undergraduates outside of true Computer Science or Data Science programs they are unlikely to use them regularly in most STEM fields. Meanwhile the number of common PC-only STEM software packages at the university level is staggering. If you want to go into programming go for it and in truth you will probably need multiple machines for the variety of tools and architectures involved but a Mac has a significant disadvantage as a sole platform in the vast majority of STEM fields. That should not even be a point of contention.
Having a Mac in STEM means you will not be able to natively run SOLIDWORKS, Autodesk Inventor, Autodesk Revit, PTC Creo, Siemens NX, current versions of CATIA, Origin, and OriginPro, most modules of ANSYS, Abaqus, and many specialized instrument or data-acquisition control packages used in chemistry, physics, and biology. This is especially true for interfaces to most universities' older instrumentation that many labs refuse to get rid of. Even Microsoft Excel, which is available on Mac, often falls short, as many labs depend on old and complex VBA macros, specialized add-ins, and plugins common in engineering lab data analysis and operations research that either do not work at all or run with reduced functionality compared to the native Windows version.
On top of that, even the macOS versions of many heavily used STEM platforms are more limited than their Windows counterparts. AutoCAD for Mac lacks specialized toolsets, full 3D rendering, Express Tools, and broad third-party plugin support. LabVIEW has a Mac version yet many hardware drivers toolkits and advanced modules remain limited or unavailable. ArcGIS Pro is Windows-only on the desktop, though web versions work. Certain optics and photonic design tools such as some configurations of Zemax OpticStudio also provide incomplete Mac support and various niche laboratory or instrument packages often ship with basic Mac ports that lag behind their Windows counterparts in features and driver support.
On the flip side, you can run Kubernetes on a PC without major issues using Docker Desktop, Minikube, Kind, k3s, or MicroK8s, all of which work on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
There is no way I would buy a generic STEM undergrad a Mac. You are viewing STEM as limited to Computer Science, Data Science, and Software Engineering when that is at best 10 percent of all STEM students. Most students (especially at the undergrad level) in biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, chemical engineering, electrical engineering (outside of pure software tracks), and a vast number of other STEM fields will never be exposed to kubes. There are always some areas that might run into it, such as computational biology, bioinformatics, genomics, computational astronomy, or climate modeling, but these are very specific applications, and in truth, the lab they are working in will have their own hardware anyway.
The risk is not worth it in STEM as a sole platform. If they decide as a sophomore or junior they want to dive into a Mac-specific field, so be it and make the investment, but for the time being (and until many of the old dinosaurs retire and their lab equipment gets upgraded), you are better off getting a PC.
That is just how the world in Higher Ed STEM is set up. It is what it is.
Having a Mac in STEM means you will not be able to natively run SOLIDWORKS, Autodesk Inventor, Autodesk Revit, PTC Creo, Siemens NX, current versions of CATIA, Origin, and OriginPro, most modules of ANSYS, Abaqus, and many specialized instrument or data-acquisition control packages used in chemistry, physics, and biology. This is especially true for interfaces to most universities' older instrumentation that many labs refuse to get rid of. Even Microsoft Excel, which is available on Mac, often falls short, as many labs depend on old and complex VBA macros, specialized add-ins, and plugins common in engineering lab data analysis and operations research that either do not work at all or run with reduced functionality compared to the native Windows version.
On top of that, even the macOS versions of many heavily used STEM platforms are more limited than their Windows counterparts. AutoCAD for Mac lacks specialized toolsets, full 3D rendering, Express Tools, and broad third-party plugin support. LabVIEW has a Mac version yet many hardware drivers toolkits and advanced modules remain limited or unavailable. ArcGIS Pro is Windows-only on the desktop, though web versions work. Certain optics and photonic design tools such as some configurations of Zemax OpticStudio also provide incomplete Mac support and various niche laboratory or instrument packages often ship with basic Mac ports that lag behind their Windows counterparts in features and driver support.
On the flip side, you can run Kubernetes on a PC without major issues using Docker Desktop, Minikube, Kind, k3s, or MicroK8s, all of which work on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
There is no way I would buy a generic STEM undergrad a Mac. You are viewing STEM as limited to Computer Science, Data Science, and Software Engineering when that is at best 10 percent of all STEM students. Most students (especially at the undergrad level) in biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, chemical engineering, electrical engineering (outside of pure software tracks), and a vast number of other STEM fields will never be exposed to kubes. There are always some areas that might run into it, such as computational biology, bioinformatics, genomics, computational astronomy, or climate modeling, but these are very specific applications, and in truth, the lab they are working in will have their own hardware anyway.
The risk is not worth it in STEM as a sole platform. If they decide as a sophomore or junior they want to dive into a Mac-specific field, so be it and make the investment, but for the time being (and until many of the old dinosaurs retire and their lab equipment gets upgraded), you are better off getting a PC.
That is just how the world in Higher Ed STEM is set up. It is what it is.
Posted on 7/24/26 at 3:55 pm to laxtonto
quote:
On the flip side, you can run Kubernetes on a PC without major issues using Docker Desktop, Minikube, Kind, k3s, or MicroK8s, all of which work on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
WSL runs in hyperv on windows. Saying you can run kubernetes on windows is the same thing as saying you can run solidworks on MacOS via parallels. It's not good, which could be why tech companies migrated en-mass to apple over the last 10 years.
quote:
depend on old and complex VBA macros
i hope they have backups
Posted on 7/24/26 at 4:29 pm to Kingpenm3
For a first year student, I'd get a Mac. They're solid machines with better engineering. Several of our engineers, including a couple of Cisco CCIE's, all use Macs.
Posted on 7/24/26 at 4:48 pm to j1897
You wouldn't believe the level of bullshite most STEM labs still run. The number of labs that run experiments and perform analysis using only junk tech is staggering. Remember, there are a lot of labs being run on equip that are older than the students running the experiments.
The problem is twofold. You have the original lab that was set up sometimes 20 or 30 years ago, and so VBA was considered OK then. Worse, these lab tech-ecosystems are all a hodgepodge of what the various postdocs, professors, and grad students knew at the time (many with little or no formal training), so easy Excel-native concepts are extremely prevalent.
Second, even though it's a mess and there are many better options, it currently works. Updating/changing things costs money, and unless it is in the grant, most schools aren't going to pay to now fix what isn't broken. It may be super inefficient, but it works.
Would I love to see the entire world of Higher Ed STEM move out of their tech stone age? Yes. But we still live in a world where COBOL runs a huge part of many government and banking systems, so expecting updates in STEM might be hoping for too much.
Higher Ed is a tech black hole of dumbassery. As much as we like to laud the cool things we do with AI and the various weird advances we see through a lot of these areas, the vast majority of STEM is just a lot of faculty who aren't really very technologically adept latching onto systems they either learned in grad school or at a conference and left to their own devices to manage. There is no rhyme or reason what exists or persists. There are no real plans at an institutional level for any of it. It is truly a sight to behold...
The problem is twofold. You have the original lab that was set up sometimes 20 or 30 years ago, and so VBA was considered OK then. Worse, these lab tech-ecosystems are all a hodgepodge of what the various postdocs, professors, and grad students knew at the time (many with little or no formal training), so easy Excel-native concepts are extremely prevalent.
Second, even though it's a mess and there are many better options, it currently works. Updating/changing things costs money, and unless it is in the grant, most schools aren't going to pay to now fix what isn't broken. It may be super inefficient, but it works.
Would I love to see the entire world of Higher Ed STEM move out of their tech stone age? Yes. But we still live in a world where COBOL runs a huge part of many government and banking systems, so expecting updates in STEM might be hoping for too much.
Higher Ed is a tech black hole of dumbassery. As much as we like to laud the cool things we do with AI and the various weird advances we see through a lot of these areas, the vast majority of STEM is just a lot of faculty who aren't really very technologically adept latching onto systems they either learned in grad school or at a conference and left to their own devices to manage. There is no rhyme or reason what exists or persists. There are no real plans at an institutional level for any of it. It is truly a sight to behold...
Posted on 7/24/26 at 8:08 pm to j1897
quote:
everything is kube, and kube runs natively on macs.
Im an engineer who works with lots of engineers who do all types of CAD and analytical stuff, and ive never heard of kube until right now. Wtf is that?
Posted on 7/24/26 at 8:34 pm to DownshiftAndFloorIt
It’s a production thing. Runs everything you click on, or query from cloud.
This post was edited on 7/24/26 at 8:37 pm
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