<p>Hi, I've been looking and searching for a laptop for college use. I have less than a year before going to college and I plan to major in engineering specifically Mechanical Engineer(If I get in).</p>
<p>So what I look for is a battery life of at least 6-7+hours, a decent graphic card(for Photoshop and other editing programs), and at least an Intel Core i5 processor. My budget is less than $1400 preferable below $1000.</p>
<p>I want to do some(just a little) gaming on this laptop but not heavy ones maybe just games like Maple or Lost Saga. I prefer Windows because of more compatibilities than Macs for programs and games but if there is no other laptops that can beat the macs than I'll just play other games.</p>
<p>So far here is what I have found:
Apple MacBook Pro MD101LL/A 13.3-Inch Laptop</p>
<p>Lenovo Y50 4k UHD</p>
<p>If you can suggest better ones and maybe a bit of a summary of your usage of your laptops(if you have one) during your college life will be great. Thank you.</p>
<p>With that budget, there are a lot of really nice computers you can get. Engineering is one of the few majors I know of with Windows-only software (like SolidWorks), but you’ll probably be using these on school lab machines rather than buying your own ridiculously-expensive copy. It also sounds like you’re interested in Windows for some basic gaming. So with those 2 things, I’d recommend a PC over a Mac.</p>
<p>The Lenovo you list is very much a gaming laptop, aimed at graphics & power at the expense of battery and portability. A 4k display is also kind of overkill at this point for most things. Lenovo’s best computers are the Thinkpad line. I have a Thinkpad T440p with an i5 processor, 9 cell battery, 1600x900 display, and I get 10ish hours of battery with no attempts at power-saving. I got it with 4 GB of RAM but added an extra 4 GB when I got it (cheaper than getting 8 GB straight from Lenovo), which was worth it. I waited for a good sale and got it for $880. It’s much higher build quality than my previous machine, a 17" Acer that I had for 3 years. It ended up with a huge line of dead pixels, battery life dropped to 15 minutes, and it overheated doing anything remotely intense.</p>