<p>would the basic entry level of the 13 inch macbook pro with the i5 processor have enough power for a chemical engineering major?</p>
<p>It should. Make sure that you can live with dual-boot or Parallels or What-Have-You Windows emulation if your school requires some pesky Wintel-only applications.</p>
<p>Make sure you keep running virtual machines within virtual machines. Conceptually, it’ll be like inception…except every layer will be slower than the one outside of it.</p>
<p>Honestly, if you’re going to be running emulators so often, don’t get a Mac.</p>
<p>Macs, generally speaking, don’t have the specs of a Windows machine of the same price. So running Windows in a virtual machine on a Mac just seems like a disaster combination to me.</p>
<p>Mac buyers, generally speaking, want a Mac even if Win is cheaper. Specs don’t have much to do with the overall user experience.</p>
<p>Just to be clear, you do not need to (and probably should not) run Windows as a virtual machine on Mac hardware. You can simply create a dual-boot system that boots up in either the Windows or Mac OS, depending on your needs. In either case, the OS currently running is the Root OS, there is no virtual machine.</p>