<p>You’re going to want a new one after 2-3 years anyways</p>
<p>I bought a HP DV6T for about $700 over two years ago when I started grad school and it has suited me fine. The most complex program I’ve had to run is MATLAB. Any thing like Solidworks, Ansys, or CFX, I can run on a school computer via a VPN connection. I’m guessing most schools have similar setups. My friends with Macs complain about switching over to Windows and associated problems with that in order to run certain programs, so why bother getting a Mac?</p>
<p>Sure you could run Windows on a Mac running Parallels/Bootcamp but by the same token I could partition the hard drive on a PC laptop to dualboot OSX/Windows7, but what is the point? Just because it is doable doesn’t mean it is the best option.</p>