<p>I'm really attracted to the long battery life and nice display on the 13" MacBook Pro, but I'm not sure if I need a Windows PC as a CS major. As far as what I'm going to use it for, I won't do any video/image editing and I'll do only very little gaming, but as a CS major I'll obviously use it for programming and other school stuff. Should I stick to Windows, or is a Mac fine for my purposes?</p>
<p>No, you don’t need to avoid Macs. In fact, most of my CS professors use Macs. Windows is not ideal for a lot of programming activities, so most people in academia in CS use Mac or Linux and hate Windows. Things like the command line are the same in Linux/Mac and are sort of the industry standard. You may also have to write programs in your program that run on the CS department machines, which are usually Linux. You will probably run into fewer problems writing on Mac than Linux in that scenario.
In short: if you want a Mac, get a Mac.</p>
<p>What @nanotechnology said. All of my professors use Macs, most tech companies use Macs (Google even banned Windows on office computers), virtually all startups use Macs, the old Unix dudes use Macs. I could go on. …</p>
<p>But you don’t “need one”. My Windows friends do just fine. I mean, they have to log into the super slow school server to compile their C programs… and they have to install third party software to do what Linux or OS X do out of the box… but they do just fine :-). Macs are just a bit more convenient in those terms.</p>