<p>So what are people getting Mac or a PC?</p>
<p>I am trying to decide between the Lenovo W series thinkpad 3.0 processor that comes with a Windows 7 upgrade or the 2.66GHz 15" Macbook Pro.</p>
<p>Cost come out to be pretty similar any advice?</p>
<p>Are there a lot of engineering students using macs?</p>
<p>Anybody out there choose a mac and regret it? Those that switched from PC to Mac are you happy?</p>
<p><em>snerk</em> This can border on religious belief for some people.</p>
<p>I’ve seen engineering students who prefer Macs, engineering students who prefer PCs, non-engineering students who prefer macs, and non-engineering students who prefer PCs. Keep in mind, though, that unless you want to put all the software that you might need for classes (e.g. Matlab, SolidWorks) on your own computer, you’ll probably be doing a fair amount of work on cluster computers (which run Linux) anyway.</p>
<p>I personally love my 2.66GHz 15" MacBook Pro. 
The only thing I dislike about it is that because it’s sooo expensive I’m always a little wary about taking it places for fear that it’ll get stolen/broken. This kind of defeats the purpose of having a laptop to begin with. This problem was recently solved for me when my lab, which is awesome, bought me a 10.1" HP Mini to do lab work on. The HP Mini only cost about $400, and is perfect for taking places that you wouldn’t want to bring your nice big computer (airplanes, buses, trains, classes, anywhere where there’s a slightly higher risk of it getting broken or stolen). I know $400 isn’t exactly a trivial amount of money, but if you get one of the slightly-less-nice MacBook Pros, you’d save more than $400. (The HP Mini, which I have partitioned to run either Windows or Ubuntu, also saves me from having to have a Windows partition on my Macbook, which is nice.)</p>
<p>I don’t know, that’s just what works for me. However, I wouldn’t suggest getting the HP Mini in particular; The new EeePC is only about $350, and has a 10 hour battery life (compared to the HP Mini’s 4-5 hours), and otherwise has about the same specs as the HP Mini. :)</p>
<p>Lenovos are very reliable (much more so than Macs). A PC would also be better because there are many applications that are incompatible with Macs.
As for the netbook idea, it’s a great one. One improvement on the idea would be to get Google’s new Chrome OS when it comes out. When you are out and about, you probably don’t want to wait for the laptop to start because that wastes battery life, and Chrome OS should be faster (there isn’t any real info atm). Oh, and it’s free.</p>
<p>Perhaps it’s just my Mac pride flaring up here, but MrCalifornian seems a tad biased. I’m sure both Lenovos and Macs are very reliable, especially because I just did a quick Google search, and equally sure that a technically sound university like MIT whose students are almost half Mac-users wouldn’t be less than Mac-friendly in terms of software (unless you’re going into mechanical engineering). But I won’t (or at least I’m not trying to) start an argument.</p>
<p>As a more direct answer to the topic creator’s question, here’s what MIT’s student blogger Michael Snively has to say about the issue: [MIT</a> Admissions | Blog Entry: “Laptops!”](<a href=“http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/learning/libraries_facilities_computing/laptops.shtml]MIT”>http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/learning/libraries_facilities_computing/laptops.shtml)</p>
<p>I’d just test-run every laptop you’re considering. Try your friends’ if they have the ones you’re considering and if not go to a store and ask the guy to show you the works. If it doesn’t seem to fit with your style, you probably shouldn’t get it–you don’t need something not directly school-related making your adaptation process a little harder.</p>
<p>Hehe you got me. I don’t care for Macs myself, but one of my friends had a battery issue with his. Yes, these problems are widespread in the PC world as well (perhaps moreso), but of the many people I have known with Lenovos, none have ever had any hardware issues.
On the other hand, I have no information about whether or not the applications will be incompatible. In fact, it is likely that all of them would be entirely supported (based on the number of Mac users and the very useful post you mentioned), but it is something to be wary of.
By all means, I would test out the ones you are considering. At least make a trip to an Apple store, but I don’t think they sell many (if any) Lenovos in brick-and-mortar locations. Also, look at some review sites and see what they say about each. Most of these are impartial (much more than I am :)) and can point out things you probably wouldn’t notice until after using them for a while. Finally, I’d check out some forums (notebookreview.com is a good one). Have fun choosing!</p>
<p>Can I chime in as a three-year employee at the Computing Help Desk? :)</p>
<p>Basically, I advise people to get what they’re most comfortable with. There are lots of programs that don’t run on Mac OS, but with Bootcamp, Parallels, VMWare, etc as well as publicly available cluster computers, I don’t know of anyone who has a problem with this. </p>
<p>If you’re more comfortable with using a PC, I say stick with it. If you’re looking to make the switch to the Mac, now might be a good time. One thing to keep in mind is that not only are Macs more expensive, they have pretty lousy warranty coverage compared to Dell and Lenovo. A simple problem on your Mac can cost you hundreds of dollars to repair. With Dell you can buy the “complete care” warranty, which even covers accidental damage. The routine repairs I made on my laptop over 3 years (replacing physically worn parts, as well as a troublesome DVD drive and power cord) made the warranty more than worth it.</p>
<p>My point is, take these things into consideration and just try to consider what you want. I know that’s sort of lousy advice, but getting unbiased advice about mac vs pc is pretty impossible, especially in a forum full of MIT students. =) I think what ultimately matters is what works for you.</p>
<p>Laura, similar coverage is available with the Apple Care plan no? That is what I purchased and it is 3 years of labour + parts fully covered afaik</p>
<p>As far as I know, Apple does not offer any warranty which covers accidental damage. Which means if you show up with a laptop that’s not functioning and the case is scratched, they can say “hmm, looks like you dropped it, that’s not covered, sorry.” With Dell’s Complete Care plan, you can spill a bottle of soda all over the computer and they will repair it for free.</p>
<p>My family has never had a problem getting anything repaired on a mac. My sister once needed a new hard drive a few years after she bought her macbook. She scheduled an appointment, and they replaced it for free, even though she did not buy the extended warranty and was technically not covered.</p>
<p>Well, you certainly had an unbiased opinion, LauraN! Now you’ve inspired me.</p>
<p>Aside from the user experience (aesthetics and OS mainly), there are significant hardware differences in these two notebooks. It is important to note that these hardware differences will manifest themselves in different ways with each computer (that is, if the specs were switched, the amount of change would be different for each computer).
Now for my thoughts.</p>
<p>Processors:
The Lenovo’s processor is somewhat superior. The clock speed of them has less than a .2 GHz difference (hardly significant), but the Lenovo has a bigger L2 cache (twice as big, in fact). Refer to [Conclusion</a> - Review Tom’s Hardware : Does Cache Size Really Boost Performance?](<a href=“http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cache-size-matter,1709-8.html]Conclusion”>Conclusion - Does Cache Size Really Boost Performance? | Tom's Hardware) for verification of the importance of this difference.</p>
<p>Screen:
If you can afford it, the WUXGA TFT upgrade is <em>well worth it</em> for the Lenovo. Without this, the Lenovo’s larger screen with the same resolution means chunkier looking everything (each pixel is larger), so that’s personal preference. The Lenovo has one huge advantage here, though: matte finish. You will be very very annoyed if you plan on using any of the outdoor wifi all over MIT with a glossy screen like the Apple has.</p>
<p>Graphics:
Lenovo owns here. If you are doing anything graphics-intensive, and you compared these two, the MacBook would look like it’s crawling through the snow (and not as quickly as a Snow Leopard would either :)). The benchmarks show the 2700M as almost 4x better than the 9400M.</p>
<p>RAM:
Apple distinctly wins on this front. You probably won’t ever get up to the 4GB limit, but you can very easily reach 2GB. 3 is usually sufficient, unless you are planning on either doing 3-D intensive AutoCAD or use Photoshop a lot. If you are going to upgrade anything on the Lenovo, make it the RAM (you have a $40 difference anyway). Go at least with the 3GB; I have 4GB and I’ve only gone over the 3GB limit once or twice.</p>
<p>Mouse:
The Lenovo’s mouse has a right-click button. 'Nuff said. The Apple does have multitouch (useful? I don’t know).</p>
<p>Fingerprint Reader:
I looove having this! It makes logging in to your computer much more secure (you can have a really long password and not have to type it in every time). With mine, you can remember passwords for websites (although not in Chrome). Apple? Not even an option.
As a side note, you should put a boot password on your computer (you can do this from BIOS). The only drawback is that you won’t be able to do <em>anything</em> if you forget it (but then neither can anyone who steals it), at least not easily (at all).</p>
<p>Camera:
Apple’s is built-in, Lenovo’s is $30.</p>
<p>Hard Drive:
How much music do you have? I have between 20 and 30 <em>thousand</em> songs and it only takes up ~120GB (even with a lot of FLAC albums). Do you download a lot of video? Do you have more than 3,000 pictures (that takes up ~10GB)? Even with all of this, I wouldn’t bother to upgrade the size of the HDD on either one of these notebooks. If you want a lot of storage, it would cost less to buy your own HDD, internal or external. On the other hand, I’d say it’s worth it to go with the 7,200RPM upgrade (to make programs load faster/transfer files faster). Your disk may not last as long, but unless you plan on keeping your computer for more than a decade, I doubt you will run into issues.
The Lenovo has an option for a second hard drive, so I would spend the $85 you could on the upgrade simply getting your own (you can get around the best HDD for a laptop for $100).</p>
<p>Intel Turbo Memory:
I have this, but don’t know how well it works. Some say it doesn’t do anything, so I wouldn’t get this option.</p>
<p>CD/DVD Drive:
I think these are the same (unless you want to watch Blu-ray, but that’s waaay pricey, and you’d have to upgrade the Lenovo’s screen).</p>
<p>Expansion Cards:
Haven’t used this slot once.</p>
<p>Wireless:
These two are pretty much the same.</p>
<p>Battery:
On this, Apple owns. About 2.5x better than Lenovo. However, the Apple’s is NOT interchangeable, so you couldn’t buy an extra battery or replace this one if it starts going out.</p>
<p>Conclusion:
If you can go ~250 over the $2,000 basics of each, the Lenovo is much better (in terms of hardware). The screen and graphics cards will blow that Apple away. However, this comes at a price. You would have to upgrade the screen to WUXGA (the most important upgrade), then the RAM (3 or 4GB depending on what you plan to do on it), and buy another HDD (but you could still use the one it comes with, thus giving you a lot of storage capacity you probably won’t use up). If you want a great second hard drive, I’d go with the [Newegg.com</a> - Seagate Momentus 7200.4 ST9320423AS 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive - Laptop Hard Drives](<a href=“Not Found: 404 Error”>Not Found: 404 Error), a newer version of the one I currently use. It’s only $75, so it’s less than upgrading to a slower one, while gaining the extra storage. If you cannot do a single upgrade, the hardware is still better on the Lenovo. The only other consideration you have is how important aesthetics are to you (and whether you like the white look), and the general user interface. I can’t tell you about keyboards because I have not used that of either one, but I have used both Windows and OSX. Don’t get me wrong, Windows sucks. It’s just that, imho, OSX is worse. You can get everything done on a Mac that you can on a PC (why Apples aren’t Personal Computers, I don’t know, but I’m sticking with this convention for now), but not necessarily with applications that are as competent. Evidently (as LauraN has confirmed positively), all that you will need for any major save one will work on a Mac. Not every application is compatible, however; e.g., Chrome is still in development stages on OSX. If this is less of a concern to you, you’re fine, and you can always dual-boot (but you’d have to buy or pirate Windows, and it’s eat up a large chunk of your HDD). If you go with the latter option of obtaining Windows, you could do the same for OSX (and you could try it out this way too). The rest of the UI on OSX is preferred by some (although I cannot stand it after using it in the computer labs of a school I went to). Macs don’t get viruses, but neither to PCs if you are cautious enough (I haven’t had any ever, and I’ve been without AV software for months). Weigh your options well, and then make your choice.</p>
<p>Have fun choosing!</p>
<p>Note on multitouch: It’s awesome. You want it. It’s VERY useful.</p>
<p>I didn’t actually read the rest of that post so I can’t speak for the rest; just something that caught my eye. :)</p>
<p>Really? What do you use it for? Can you zoom, rotate, etc.? That would be pretty cool!
I don’t blame you for not reading it. I wrote it in segments and didn’t realize how inordinately long that was until I posted it :).</p>
<p>Multi touch is just really very intuitive, as I find to be true with the mac GUI in general. I switched for the first time for MIT to a MBP from a Sony PC and love it, especially since I can run XP in VMware/Bootcamp whenever I need it. An example of an intuitive move for me is when I wanted to delete an icon from my task bar on the top of the screen (not the dock). I assumed it would require something in control panel or something of that nature, as it would in PC, but in reality you just drag it off and it disappears. That may not be the best example, but it just tends to be more intuitive.</p>
<p>As per the specifics of multi-touch the gestures are:</p>
<p>two finger tap is right click</p>
<p>two finger scrolling is scrolling on web pages, documents etc</p>
<p>one finger tap a file and move a second finger while the first is down in dragging an icon for example</p>
<p>Pinch is zoom</p>
<p>Two finger rotate is rotating pics or documents</p>
<p>Three finger swipe is change pictures or in FF 3.5/Safari its back or forward</p>
<p>4 finger up swipe is clear screen to desktop</p>
<p>4 finger down swipe is expose in which it tiles every window</p>
<p>4 finger side swipe is the mac version of alt-tab</p>
<p>Yeah I remember that dragging thing. I suppose it’s just not my style; I’d rather an options menu where I can add as well as remove items. The dual bars always annoyed me too; I removed the only one in Windows, so I switch windows with Alt-Tab which I think I’d find faster than 4 finger side swipe. I use keyboard shortcuts a lot.
So if two finger tap is right click (a sorely-lacking feature), how do you right click in web pages? Actually, two finger tap scrolls on web pages for me, too, but I rarely use it.
Double-tap and drag does the same drag-and-drop as the physically-complex action you described.
Those others sound very useful for Google Earth or Maps though. I suppose a lot of this is a matter of preference (although the multitouch can’t hurt anything).
Edit: whoops sorry about the lack of impartiality there!</p>
<p>^I use a two-button mouse on my Mac at work to accomplish right-clicking.</p>
<p>I use a Mac at the lab and a PC at home, and I wouldn’t want to have it any other way. I love that my Mac lets me clear the screen and look at the desktop, as well as look at all the open windows at the same time. I also love the spotlight search. But I still love my home PC – when it freezes, it’s easier for me to figure out what’s wrong than when my Mac freezes. It would drive me nuts to have a Mac at home, where I mostly use the computer as a netbook, but it definitely works as a lab computer, where I’m doing five zillion things at once and have a harder time controlling the insanity.</p>
<p>@MrCalifornian</p>
<p>the multi-touch can detect the difference between an active scroll (placing fingers on the pad and moving) versus just two fingers quickly tapping. I dont like to actually like the pad as a)my MBP the pad is a tad too firm to easily do it (i can adjust this if I take off the cover but I don’t care enough to void the warranty) and b)i grew up tapping touchpads anyway</p>
<p>Haha but a two-button mouse is cheating! Yeah that is a pretty great feature, but with Windows 7 you just go to the bottom left corner and you have the same effect: it shows your desktop and a clear version of the Windows you have open, and if you click it, you can click desktop icons. I don’t have any, but it’s still a neat feature I suppose.
You know, I’ve just started using my PC as a netbook. When Chrome OS was announced, I had just reinstalled Windows (Kubuntu was too frustrating and didn’t support Wireless-N), so I decided to try out the experience. Now I have literally no applications except Chrome (browser) installed. It’s going well so far, but I’m sure it’d be better with Chrome OS.</p>
<p>@AKiss20
Oh well that makes sense! So I suppose it is potentially effective at least. It really comes down to a matter of preference and conditioning for most of this debate; if Apple had MS’ market share, things might be different. Regardless, I don’t like Macs myself, but to each his own :)!</p>
<p>Haha but a two-button mouse is cheating! Yeah that is a pretty great feature, but with Windows 7 you just go to the bottom left corner and you have the same effect: it shows your desktop and a clear version of the Windows you have open, and if you click it, you can click desktop icons. I don’t have any, but it’s still a neat feature I suppose.
You know, I’ve just started using my PC as a netbook. When Chrome OS was announced, I had just reinstalled Windows (Kubuntu was too frustrating and didn’t support Wireless-N), so I decided to try out the experience. Now I have literally no applications except Chrome (browser) installed. It’s going well so far, but I’m sure it’d be better with Chrome OS.</p>
<p>@AKiss20
Oh well that makes sense! So I suppose it is potentially effective at least. It really comes down to a matter of preference and conditioning for most of this debate; if Apple had MS’ market share, things might be different. Regardless, I don’t like Macs myself, but to each his own :)!</p>
<p>"Regardless, I don’t like Macs myself, but to each his own ! "</p>
<p>Thats been my philosophy on this debate for a long time. It greatly irritates me when people are so single-minded about platforms that they have to insist that one or the other is the absolute, no choice, single way to go. Each platform has its advantages and disadvantages. Research them both, decide what works for you, and go for it!</p>
<p>Cheers</p>