Help Dad pick computer for EE Freshman Son

[u/AdventurousFront9681]

Pretty much what the title says. If you happen to be an EE major at Brown, I'd love to know your thouhgts on Mac vs. PC and overall specs for a laptop. Thanks in advance for your time.

[u/duddnddkslsep]

Mac M4 will do just fine, more RAM the better

[u/Kingmelo62 → u/duddnddkslsep]

Nah, go windows over Mac

[u/Easy-Arrival-948 → u/duddnddkslsep]

Thank you.

[u/Sea-Home-9296 → u/duddnddkslsep]

windows laptop? mac is not great for engineering

[u/AdventurousFront9681 → u/Sea-Home-9296]

About half of what I read online indicates Windows is prefered because its better for the software that engineers need. The other half swears by Macs, even for engineers. This is why I figured I'd ask Brown engineers directly!

[u/PufferfishYummy → u/AdventurousFront9681]

The windows vs Mac OS distinction is not as important as people say. Most engineers at brown have Mac's and do well. There are also computer labs and you can log into a brown pc remotely from your laptop

[u/duddnddkslsep → u/Sea-Home-9296]

mac is industry standard

[u/Sea-Home-9296 → u/duddnddkslsep]

For CS sure, for EE you need a lot of prereq apps that arent avaliable natively

[u/Sea-Home-9296 → u/Sea-Home-9296]

Altium Designer, Xilinx ISE, Vivado, SKM PowerTools, EasyPower, and other industrial PLC packages like Rockwell Automation are not avalible unless you use a paid vm which is a lot slower when you could just buy a windows laptop… Also for windows you can just dual boot linux if you want a unix experience

[u/LoveToLive1234 → u/duddnddkslsep]

COMSOL runs wonky on Mac

[u/lurainerotisserie]

Both of my roommates are EE (I’m a senior this year) and all four years have used Macs with no issues. I’m in physics and use a lot of the same programs as they do on my Mac without any issues. At least for the coursework at Brown it shouldn’t make a difference

[u/AdventurousFront9681 → u/lurainerotisserie]

Thank you for taking the time to write. Good luck senior year!

[u/Roger_Freedman_Phys]

When your son contacted the undergraduate advisors in the EE department for their comments, what was their reply?

[u/Money_Cold_7879 → u/Roger_Freedman_Phys]

Damn did you really have to go there? (lurking fellow-parent here finding it difficult to not do things for my about to be freshman son whose answer to ‘did you do xyz, time’s a ticking’ is invariably ‘on it’ but no follow through).

[u/Money_Cold_7879 → u/Money_Cold_7879]

This is not a critique of your comment btw, I needed the reminder

[u/Roger_Freedman_Phys → u/Money_Cold_7879]

As professor (though not at Brown), I always appreciate parents who nudge their offspring to do what university students are supposed to do!

[u/Alarming-Material-87]

Back in my day most of the software we needed ran either on a Linux virtual machine or on Windows machines in the computer lab. Other than matlab and maybe a few other pieces of SW, there weren’t licenses available to install tools on student’s machines. The laptop you used didn’t matter that much because nothing was running on your local system other than whatever you used to VNC or ssh to the remote host. Also, not necessarily relevant to your question, but this is how CE/EEs work in industry (at least those of us in semiconductors).

[u/AdventurousFront9681 → u/Alarming-Material-87]

This is super helpful info. Thank you.

[u/SkyTheGuy8]

Mac vs Windows decision is a matter of personal preference, and I think you should have a discussion with your son about it. both can work when it comes to course work AFAIK

Windows is more flexible because you can certain run engineering software directly on the machine rather than remotely accessing Brown's computing resources. Plus, Apple is super anti-consumer which makes playing around with the machine (i.e. different operating systems like Linux) more difficult, which MIGHT be something a software-oriented EE might want to do