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Re: Should I buy a Mac or a PC?
A few observations from the parent of a recent WPI grad (Electrical & Biomed Engg):
I offered to buy her the laptop of her choice as a HS graduation present. The WPI ECE department head was adamant that she should get a PC because their labs were run on them and that some of the EE software was "PC only". My daughter had used both in HS, but strongly preferred the Mac and ended up deciding on a Powerbook. I got her the top spec model at the time (1.67 GHz, 2 GB, Radeon 9700 with 128 MB), which continues to perform well.
As far as the "PC only" software, it also runs on a Unix server which she could log onto, so she had little problem running it from the Mac. There was a bonus there, since it forced her to learn Xterminal and Unix commands, which many of her PC-based classmates only touched on.
Since she did run some of her labs on the lab PCs, you could argue that she got a more well-rounded education in those applications. Then again, some of her PC-toting classmates probably learned more about the inner workings of the PC than she did, which may help them in a PC-centric workplace.
Before she made her choice I spec'ed out a comparable Dell, and it cost just about the same as the Powerbook, once optioned out to a similar hardware level. From the reviews and articles I've read, this us usually the case.
All that said, your case may be different. One can almost always set up a PC for an application for less than a Mac, and some schools do not provide as much support for Macs as they do PCs (for whatever reason).
I can't resist this closing anecdote: When we moved my daughter into her freshman dorm, we set up her network connection on the Mac and she was on the school network in minutes. A little while later, a student came around through the dorm to help get the freshmen's PCs configured and connected. Apparently the IT group expected that few would be able to make all the changes themselves (probably a correct assessment). He poked his head in my daughter's room saw that she had a Mac, and said "Oh, you've got a Mac. You're okay here, right?" (or something to that effect).
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Pete Kieselbach
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