<p>“Maybe. But really, doing all your work at a school lab isn’t terribly inconvenient. I mean, that’s kind of what most people with jobs do, right? They do all their work at work, and then at home they are free to do w/e.”</p>
<p>No. Where I work, people work where it’s comfortable for them. They need to put in an appearance in the office from time to time for meetings and chit-chat. In my previous job, my manager was in the UK while all of the workers were in the US. Our current group has a guy that lives in Texas during the winter and New England during the summer. We have group members in India too.</p>
<p>In previous jobs, I’ve worked with people around the world, including those in bomb shelters in the middle of a war.</p>
<p>In many cases, you don’t have to go to the lab to use the university’s software. You can set up a remote SSH session and pipe the gui back to your local system. For Windows applications, a university could setup VNC or Tarantella sessions to send a desktop back to you remotely. I think that Citrix provides remote PC support too.</p>
<p>I vote the lattitude from those choices. The extra cost on the Apple laptops don’t warrant the extra money (in fact, I don’t see the appeal in Macs anyways). The difference in the laptops aren’t very large, and tablets are a pain anyways.</p>
<p>Well since laptops get outdated quite quickly, I would say get a regular laptop, nothing too fancy for your first two years since you won’t be using any hardcore engineering software until junior year. When junior year comes get a laptop that can handle engineering software.</p>
<p>uhhh…you guys have it all wrong. Buy a desktop, and a notebook for those rare times you actually need to write documents on the go. You can have two devices for under 1000 easy…and you could find a monitor for <150 bux. Be realistic… you are not going to need autocad/ other engineering programs on your laptop.</p>
<p>yeah i was wondering about this –> how often do you actually require the portability of a laptop? it’s much more cost-efficient to get a desktop, so is a laptop really worth it?</p>
<p>It all depends on the person. I have friends that use their laptop everywhere, and it’s their only computing device (some of these friends are grad students doing computer computer modeling for their PhDs, too). Others, like myself, can’t stand working on laptops and only use them when they’re traveling.</p>