<p>hey, im an incoming freshman & ME major.</p>
<p>im in the market for a new laptop. i heard from some friends that macs are not good for engineering students @ berkeley? seems random / obscure to me, but what's this about? any truth to it or what</p>
<p>considering macs boot windows xp now natively id say ur friends are misinformed...</p>
<p>Buy whatever you want, in the end it doesn't matter.</p>
<p>Most of the professors have Macs anyways (yes, in EECS).</p>
<p>Im in the same situation as you, i'll be in ME at berkeley and i'm trying figure out if it would be a bad idea to buy a Mac. Im trying to decide between the Dell Latitude D620 and Apple Macbook (not pro). Windows is also coming out with Vista, which looks pretty cool.</p>
<p>don't get a macbook (non-pro) -- it has an integrated graphics card! macbook pro is well worth its $1700 price tag.... x1600 should be sufficient for autocad programs</p>
<p>If you're buying a Mac, you won't be playing graphic intensive games that require a special graphics coprocessor.</p>
<p>The integrated graphics card will do just fine. Graphics work can be offloaded to the CPU anyways seeing as the MacBooks use Core Duos and it'd actually put some stress on the CPU.</p>
<p>If you want to do CAD work, you'll need a workstation graphics card (ATI FireGL or nVidia Quadro), something consumer level laptops do not include.</p>
<p>Like I said, get what you want and can afford. Macs are no longer horribly overpriced and I'd reccommend it to anyone who can not fix their own computers and by fix I mean hacking into system files to fix screwups.</p>
<p>1 more thing to consider: Apple's first generation products ALWAYS have some major problem. MacBooks have whining and overheating issues right now.</p>