Macbook and Engineering

[beach89]

I"m starting in college in late September, so I don't have to buy a laptop for a while, but I was wondering if a macbook was ok for engineering. I'm going to OSU, and their first year engineering program has all students using Autodesk Inventor Pro and Matlab. The minimum requirements they give are:

Intel® Pentium® M Processor
or equivalent, 1.5 GHz

512 MB Memory
(1GB if shared video memory configuration)

40 GB Hard Drive
(with 20 GB available)

64 MB OpenGL-capable graphics video
(shared memory is okay if 1GB main memory)

14 inch display

The macbook has all of those requirements, but it barely passes on the video card. Is it usable for engineering? Since I have to wait an extra six months, would the next update(monteniva+GMA X4500) be significantly better?

 

[vansouza]

You might do better with a MBPro instead, the screen is 13inches on a MB. Can you possibly contact the University and inquire with them?

 

[beach89]

You might do better with a MBPro instead, the screen is 13inches on a MB. Can you possibly contact the University and inquire with them?

I'll probably learn a bit more at orientation. I'm buying an external monitor anyway, so the screen size doesn't bother me. I'd rather not have to spend so much extra on a MBP, since I don't play any games or really do anything other than school work that would require the extra $.

 

[vansouza]

Got you. Actually, I like my MB better then my MBP which I just gave to my partner.

 

[beach89]

Got you. Actually, I like my MB better then my MBP which I just gave to my partner.

Yeah, I like the size of a macbook better. Plus I can get a $200 off an ipod with a new MB during the summer, but if I had to get a MBP, then I would have to get it refurb and I couldn't get the ipod discount.