College-bound: Which Laptop for Computer Science Degree

[Keltron]

Have you considered a Surface Pro? I'm typing from one right now and I'm a Computer Science minor. The stylus + OneNote is so useful for all my classes I've stopped bringing a pen and paper to class. I've been looking for the perfect laptop this entire time and I honestly wish that I had this when I was a Freshmen (I'm a senior now). I used to bring a Macbook Pro to class, but when I would need to write something (such as a graph, or equation) it would be really hard to incorporate that into my typed notes. The stylus of the Surface Pro comes in handy for that purpose. PM me if you have any questions!

Here is a video showing the features of OneNote with the Surface Pro.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7OROShRVzQ#t=1464

[NorCalAthlete]

I would wait. I'm currently wrapping up my second semester of a CS degree on a 2008 15" MacBook Pro and it's more than enough to do everything. Best thing would be to simply get him a spare monitor - he's gonna want the extra screen real estate for having a skype group chat/study session open, a PDF of his textbook, a window for Eclipse or BlueJ or whatever his school uses, plus one for googling stack overflow help or whatever - and that's at a minimum.

2 years from now when he's halfway into his degree and getting into heavier coding would be the time to get him the latest and greatest MacBook that'll carry over into the workforce after graduation. And from then on he can buy his own, or more than likely his work may provide a work laptop for him.

[Tempus]

Not sure where everyone else is coming from so I'll give a little background on why I'm adding 2 more cents.

I'm in the game industry and have done AAA and mobile for the last 15 yrs. I do a ton of hiring for our division and do recruiting events at Berkeley, Stanford, USC, UCLA and a few our of state schools. As such, I have a strong idea of what people are doing and how they are using their technology and where they need to go.

Does the Mac vs. PC thing matter? Not really. If you want to do server work then you need to have a *nix background. Mac can be slightly better for that but you can just dual boot the PC and get it as well.

Both have tons of solutions to do what the other does. You can bootcamp, run VMs, run parallels or whatever. Most software has versions for either.

I find that perforce and visual studio are significantly better in PC land.
Git and SVN are equal.
Eclipse doesn't seem to care but my mac version tends to have a bit more issues.
**Xcode is an iOS only party.** This is only important if you want to write iOS apps. But apple is still the biggest monetizing market for mobile so if your child is planning on doing side projects or wants to show off and have good things on his resume, then apple is currently the strongest choice for that.

So it depends.

If the CS program is C/C++/C# heavy then I'd personally hang out in PC land.
If its a java world then it doesn't matter.
If they have many objective-c/iOS classes then I'd get a Mac.
If they focus on other languages then I'd switch school.

As a note - internships are key. Push your child to start applying for them this fall. Be the annoying parent.

[whobob]

CS = Engineering

Can't go wrong with a macbook, you can bootcamp Win7 if you can't work with OSX