The Student Room Group

Laptop for architecture degree?

Would appreciate if any second/third year students could advise me on an ideal laptop I should buy before uni. Are macs really that overrated and would buying one be a total waste of money?
Mac wouldn't give you any advantage and you would need to run windows on it as well to run some of the software you need. So yes, as ever they are overpriced and not worth it.
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ArchLand
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Well I am a recent architecture graduate and may give a quick piece of advice!

I have used macbook pro retina 15 with maximum specs throughout my uni lofe and It was flawless. The thing is if you prefer mac then you should buy the 15" model with a dedicated graphic card and at least 8 gb of ram (16 better) 256 gb of ssd (512 better) and a good mouse. You also get student discount + 3 years of warranty. But again you need to run windows via bootcamp. With mac you tend to use it for at least 7 years without any problem.


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A high spec Windows laptop will do the same but still cost less than a Mac. So say you get a Dell spend about £800-1k you get good spec to the £ with Dell more than any other manufacturer I reckon, plus they are usually very reliable - I have never had a problem with one. Mac you'll be paying a lot more for similar or less spec even with student discount. They look nice externally but so do most laptops these days. The few hundred pounds extra you pay with the Mac is for the 'poser factor' though quite a lot have them these days so don't know how far that will take you if at all anywhere.

Don't forget you will most likely have to spend quite a few hundred on software. A laptop without the software you need will be near useless anyway. Autodesk stuff is free for students but there is other software you'll likely need that you will have to pay for.

For sure though spending good money means your laptop will last far longer before it becomes obsolete on the spec and will perform better and most vitally quicker - you need speed when doing assignments you don't want to be up all night if you can help it.
mine is Lenovo with Nvidia Getforce GTX, Intel Core i7 and a touch screen which i dont really like but it came like that can be useful in your free time. Just to mention that a lot of colleges with Mac had issues with some programs i dont really remember which ones but there were some issues with versions for mac where windows had no problems might wanna look into that before buying

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