What model and what should we put on it? I see that the Air is less than the pro, good enough?
What does he plan to major in?
A Macbook air is good enough for basic office applications, internet, and multimedia consumption.
If he’s planning to major in multimedia creation related fields(i.e. Film, CS/engineering, architecture, computer gaming creation, graphics, etc)…he may need to move up to the macbook pro.
I’d have him contact the U he’s going to attend and ask them. Sometimes they have deals and/or a preference for one system over another. Our kids stuck with PCs. D used a MacBook for one term and went back to PCs. They preferred the netbook with a desktop and two monitors and used the netbook like a portable hard drive that they’d take to class. D was in cinema and S was in electrical engineering. They had peers that used a lot of different computers and systems.
Some Us have special discount deals for their students, which can help reduce the price. We let our kids buy a month or more before they left for college. S bought from Costco and D bought from Office Depot. Neither of them found the offers from their U particularly attractive.
One thing that really helped us was buying with a Costco AmEx credit card that gave an extra year of warranty for their computers. Both of them had laptops that died in the period of time beyond the original 1 year warranty but within the extra year warranty provided by the CCard. We had to have the laptops mailed to the place designated by the AmEx warranty folks (at their expense) and evaluated that neither laptop could be repaired and we received a full refund to our CCard. Our kids thereafter bought netbooks + desktops with 2 monitors rather than laptops as they found the netbook/desktop system MUCH lighter and more useful than the laptops.
Thanks ever so much for the info
HImom, is correct. Check with the college or the particular school(within College) to find out which type of computer is needed. Most Engineering schools want PC’s rather than Mac’s.
My also wanted an Air, and we bought one refurbished from Apple for quite a bit less than it would have been new, and it came with a warranty. Still going strong, 3 years later.
My kids like their Macbook. It really depends what your kid is using it for. D2 liked to to take her very light Macbook to classes.
I switched from PC to Mac 10 years ago and never looked back. Blue screen used to kill me. I was my family’s SA, but since we got Macs kids have stopped calling me.
I use an Air for both home and work.
There are a couple threads on this. The general consensus is to check with the college and departments for recommendations and see if purchasing through the school provides any benefits (such as free maintenance or repair).
My personal recommendation would be:
[ul]
[]Microsoft Surface Pro (or one of the competing detachable 2-in-1s) with the detachable keyboard, docking station, and stylus
[]Two monitors for the dorm room
[]Office 365 subscription (which may already be provided by the school)
[]Anti-virus/Internet Security Subscription (I use McAffee, but there are many good ones out there)
[li]EndNote software[/ul][/li]
OneNote is a fantastic application that makes organizing, taking, and searching through notes a breeze. It also integrates with Outlook so that you can jot down tasks and reminders directly in the application. When coupled with the Surface Pro and stylus, you can write directly onto the tablet, so there’s no need to maintain a stack of paper notebooks. Multiple monitors make it much easier to work on assignments since you can have your reference material up on one monitor and your assignment application on another. EndNote is a fantastic application for organizing and properly citing reference material.
I don’t know about other majors, but for engineering, most computing-extensive jobs run on school’s machines. The student’s machine acts as a terminal. For that job, almost any computer will work.
My D had a Mac Pro for undergrad (UC Berkeley EECS). She told me a Mac Air would be sufficient. Among her cohorts, there were more Mac users than Windows users.
Now as a CS PhD student, she’s using a Surface, mainly because the non academic related software packages she is using (Quicken, TurboTax, Lightroom, Photoshop, …). When traveling, the only machine she brings is an iPad pro with Apple keyboard and pencil.
Hmmm very helpful, should have mentioned that he going to St. Mikes in Vermont. Liberal Arts. Undecided at the moment. No engineer here!
Our D is a liberal arts major and she is very happy with her 13" MacBook Pro. If you order online from Apple, you can qualify for the educational discount, even if you pick it up at a nearby Apple store. Our D’s college mandates use of their preferred antivirus software for computers connected to their network (they have a site license for students and faculty). Office 365 is a good idea for basic software. Check your college’s admitted students website to see what their guidelines are for computers on the campus network.
Pretty much all college emails are through outlook and come with office 365, don’t buy it unless you know you have to.
My kid’s school gave them Office for free.
^Actually the free Office nowadays is through MS, though your school will give you a link and you must use the school’s .edu email address to get it. (As an instructor, that’s how I got mine for my personal laptop, which I do a lot of school work on.) Now some writing class specific advice:
Your kids are very likely using Google Docs at high school now. And there’s a good chance that their colleges are using Canvas as their learning management system. Canvas doesn’t accept Google docs. This is an ongoing issue for me when I tell them that, but they can’t figure out how to convert Docs to Word (also, when/if they do, formatting also changes.) So make sure they actually do download that free Office 365 and use it.
Additionally, Canvas doesn’t accept .pages documents (annoying, but true.) Despite that, I look out at a see of glowing apples, and those students also need to learn how to export as a Word doc. (I don’t know if it’s different with other LMS’s, but Canvas is very widespread, so there’s a good chance they’ll be using it.)
None of this is hard, but I spend way too much time telling them–I can’t read your draft; you need to convert and resubmit. Or, your page breaks are in the middle of the page–you used Google Docs, didnt you? You need to convert to Word before you print.
Etc. etc. All this takes up way too much time in a first semester writing class (which I also think of as “Welcome to college…let’s talk about how to follow procedures” class.)
"Despite that, I look out at a see of glowing apples, and those students also need to learn how to export as a Word doc. "
Office works fine on Macs, and as others have mentioned it’s available for free to college students. My D uses it on her mac, so no exporting required. I use office on my Mac for work, too.
It always comes down to whether you think an apple computer is worth the price. It also depends on the major, and what your budget is. For every price point, you can get a faster & more powerful windows laptop. In my experience, windows laptops are also easier and cheaper to fix than a mac if/when things go wrong. (The battery almost blew up in my gf’s macbook and we had to get special tools and other crap to fix it and the battery was so expensive)
I used to have a macbook, and my girlfriend and mother still do, but my girlfriend is switching to windows because mac simply doesn’t cut it for architecture unless you want to spend a ton of extra money on it.
If the money matters, you can also contact the university and ask if they have deals with anybody. My college has deals with Dell and Lenovo for example.
First off…people love to trash Apple as being overpriced. It’s expensive, but if you’re in the OS ecosystem (iPhone, iPad, iCloud), it’s easy to keep everything organized by staying inside the Apple family for a PC. I have both, an MBPro for home and a MS laptop for work…an iPhone for work and an Android for a personal phone…so I’ve used most platforms and do some heavy number crunching and graphics rendering on both. They both work fine.
If possible, I would go to an apple store and determine what’s best. The conventional wisdom is the MBAir will be going away soon. The MacBook is almost the same machine, with some upgrades. The new MB Pros are very nice. I love the keyboards and the screens. They are light and fast and expensive.
The most important thing I would suggest is to get as much RAM and storage as you’re comfortable buying. You will never be sorry that you added 8GB of RAM for an extra $200. In terms of bang for the buck (within the apple world), I like the new MBPro without the touchbar. Spend the touchbar money on 8GM of RAM.
Last comment… if you’re shopping on the Apple website, make sure you scroll all the way to the bottom and click on “Shop for college”. That’ll put you into the education store…and save you a bit.
^^^ Rumor has it the full MacBook line, including the Air, will get updated next week at apple’s WWDC conference. A new iPad Pro might be introduced as well. So don’t buy anything over the weekend! 
Do any other credit cards have a warranty extension benefit? I’ve never heard of that.
$2800 for a macbook pro with a 512gb ssd and 16 gb of ram.
You could spec an similar Lenovo or HP or Asus laptop for $1,000 less (if not even cheaper)
And you can run more programs, often people have to run a dual partition on their mac to run all the programs they want to.
And if you have an android phone and use stuff like google calendar, google drive, you can have almost the same integration as you do with icloud.