Really? STEM Students Require a PC?!?

[jwdsail]

(deleted)

 

[HawkTheHusky1902]

I assume it depends what they need it for. STEM is a huge area.

Having just completed a master's in Medical Informatics, my Mac proved much more useful than those with PCs, as having Unix as the underlying O/S made everything much easier.

I believe that with a dedicated GPU some of the machine learning stuff would have been faster, but we were mainly using Tensorflow within R (using reticulate) and I'm not sure that supports GPUs anyway.

It makes it much more secure as well. Unix is very secure and much more secure than Windows.
For real though STEM does not require a lot of horsepower lol

 

[Kingcoherent]

Note that Forbes lets more or less anyone submit articles that get posted to the Forbes site with little to no editorial review.

Forbes ought not to be a name anyone trusts in the first place, and not just because of this policy.

Forbes 30 under 30, or being on the cover, has a huge association with fraud / incompetence. I'd prefer that Forbes stayed as far away from any of my work as possible. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/apr/06/forbes-30-under-30-tech-finance-prison

I've worked in research focussed STEM for twenty years. Macs more than hold their own. Yes, some tools are x86 focussed, or even Windows only. There are more that are unix only.

The biggest gap in Mac is the lack of CUDA, but for serious work you wouldn't use a personal laptop, you'd use a cloud workstation. And even there, CoreML starting to catch up for a large amount of the work you would do locally.

 

[mr_roboto]

It does bring up a good point it's shocking that AutoCAD and other design software isn't on macOS.

I teach an industrial design class (the missing A in Americas STEM), where we push the kids boundaries, and even of what’s possible in cad. Some kids bring in their gaming laptops, but a few every semester bring an intel mac. The popular 2015 15 retina is about as old as one can go running Adesk and Solidworks, which require a gig of vram to install. I help out with the i9 2019s, which require a cooling mod & fan base to not start the place on fire, but those are generally the most powerful laptops i see from anyone. But yeah, NuMacs are out.

I dunno how you guys got the idea that Autodesk software doesn't run on Macs, or only on Intel Macs. According to Autodesk, AutoCAD works under Rosetta and native Apple Silicon support is coming soon.

AutoCAD for Mac 2024: New Collaboration Enhancements and Improved Performance With M-Series Chips

Discover the new features and enhancements for AutoCAD for Mac 2024, including support for Apple Silicon architecture.

www.autodesk.com

For the first time, AutoCAD for Mac 2024 and AutoCAD LT for Mac 2024 now run natively on both Intel and Apple Silicon architectures, including M1 and M2 chips in the M-series chips. The support for Apple Silicon can increase overall performance by up to two times compared to 2023.*

Same thing applies to Fusion 360, which worked fine in Rosetta and just recently got a native update.

@Spaceboi Scaphandre in particular: you seem to be forming lots of your world views based on really crappy youtube videos. Yes, Linus Tech Tips videos say lots of things with confidence and decent-ish production values. That doesn't mean they're accurate. For example, their claim that the 3D clothing modelling program doesn't support GPU accel on Apple Silicon seems a bit wild. It's probably one of the numerous examples of a quick port which didn't do enough performance tuning to work well on Apple GPUs. These performance problems are usually easy to fix, but the reality of commercial CAD software is that it's often made with plodding release schedules, so it may take a bit. (There's a reason why Autodesk has only begun rolling out native AS versions in 2023 and 2024 releases.)

 

[theluggage]

Back on the topic, my daughter is a senior in HS, and she's considering STEM, I've been expecting to buy a MacBook and I do think that's what we'll be buying but its interesting to see that this may not be the case.

If she doesn't already have a laptop I'd pack her off with whatever hand-me-down you have lying around in a cupboard provided it can run Word and an up-to-date Chrome, which is all she's likely to need in the first few weeks (if not the whole course).

Then, when she's got the lay of the land, chosen courses etc., found out about any specific software requirements and established whether the accommodation is somwhere you'd want to leave a nice laptop, by all means buy her a shiny new MacBook (or PC) as appropriate (with student discount and any other freebies available via the institution, if possible!)

That's assuming that she doesn't get any documentation from the college specifying what sort of computer to bring.

As for the thread in general.... the Forbes article might as well have been a paid advertisement from people who would love students to turn up to uni with a couple of changes of underwear, a frying pan, a toothbrush and a shiny new Intel(tm) PC with NVIDIA(r) discrete graphics as if "doing STEM" automatically means you're gonna be training massive AI models or designing PCBs on day one. Apple would also love you to avail yourself of their Back to School promotion and get a free pair of earbuds etc. but the sensible thing to do is to make do with whatever you have (or can beg/borrow/steal) until you have at least some idea of what you will need it to do.

It is absolutely true that for some fields you're eventually going to need the right computer for the job (which will - in some cases - shock, horror! - will be an x86 Windows PC - but there are plenty of cases where Mac, being a genuine Unix system that can also run native versions of MS Office, Adobe etc. is the best fit). Macs are also pretty good for watching recorded lectures, writing essays and filling in online 'quizzes' on the school intranet, and I don't want to be jaded old guy here, but don't take those college ads where all the students are standing around in white coats building satellites and particle accelerators too literally...

...but the sweeping generalisation that "you'll need a 'real' PC because STEM" is ridiculous.

 

[Spaceboi Scaphandre]

I dunno how you guys got the idea that Autodesk software doesn't run on Macs, or only on Intel Macs. According to Autodesk, AutoCAD works under Rosetta and native Apple Silicon support is coming soon.

AutoCAD for Mac 2024: New Collaboration Enhancements and Improved Performance With M-Series Chips

Discover the new features and enhancements for AutoCAD for Mac 2024, including support for Apple Silicon architecture.

www.autodesk.com

Wait what? AutoCAD is getting a Mac port?

Well that's news to me. I had no idea since the program hasn't been on Mac for years.

 

[maflynn]

f she doesn't already have a laptop I'd pack her off with whatever hand-me-down

We have about a year to worry about it, and she still needs to pick her college so I'm not terribly worried about what she'll be using, though as I said I'd prefer a Mac for her

 

[star-affinity]

It does bring up a good point it's shocking that AutoCAD and other design software isn't on macOS.

”Our most popular 2D and 3D CAD software now available for Mac.”

CAD for Mac | Mac-Compatible Software for CAD | Autodesk

Learn more about native Mac OS-based software from Autodesk for CAD, 3D modeling, rendering, animation, visual effects, and digital imagery.

www.autodesk.com

Edit:
Sorry, missed that you already found out.

 

[NT1440]

Wait what? AutoCAD is getting a Mac port?

Well that's news to me. I had no idea since the program hasn't been on Mac for years.

I ran AutoCAD back in 2016 on my Mac. Did they pull support after that??

 

[ZZ9pluralZalpha]

The extended school sentence for a PhD in engineering has turned me into an old crank, but as others here have said in gentler terms, any non-trivial computing work in most of STEM is not realistically going to be attempted on a student's personal laptop regardless of the platform or brand. Mechanical CAD and design is best done on a big workstation with a giant monitor in a college-owned lab, if for no other reason than that the products of the big CAD players—Solidworks, Creo, Autodesk—are all such fetid piles of excrement that the hardware should be heavy enough to make you think twice before hurling it across the room in a rage; code for CS, simulations for physical sciences, and commercial FEM solvers for the non-coders all do their actual running on a rack of Linux servers somewhere; and lab instruments are run off ancient desktops on either Linux (free and still supported) or decades-old Windows versions (airgapped, because the instrument maker wants obscene money for routine maintenance patches) and are a royal headache to swap off their usual terminals.

A student's laptop is just a remote access point, text editor, tool for turning the results into slides, and personal machine. Mac + macOS excels at all of this. The article was written by morons, which is why it's in Forbes.

 

[Chuckeee]

If she doesn't already have a laptop I'd pack her off with whatever hand-me-down you have lying around in a cupboard…

Great in theory, but try to get my daughter to accept a hand-me-down anything is nearly impossible 😋. Although, buying her something used and convincing her it’s a cool vintage sometimes works.

 

[Pet3rK]

STEM is more than just science. For science yeah a Mac will do you great, after all the first images of a black hole were rendered on a 15 inch Macbook Pro

But STEM is more than just science. Engineering is a big part of STEM, and unfortunately, Mac is lacking when it comes to engineers and designers due to software compatibility issues and the lack of GPU acceleration making jobs take a lot longer.

Here's an example: CLO 3D (I know CLO is a clothing designer program when engineers use AutoDesk but this is for an example of the problems with the lack of GPU Acceleration.) On Windows CLO 3D has GPU Acceleration so models and simulations are a lot faster. On Mac there's no GPU Acceleration so fabric simulation is a lot slower than if it was done on an Nvidia workstation, which you can see a real world example of that below here:

The same is true with CAD models, and in engineering time is money. Those designs need to get made and approved as soon as possible so they can get sent to the machinists to actually build.

Then it's too broad of a brush to just sideline the Mac and you focusing on Engineering so so so hard is just eh to me. Science is a very very big part of STEM and it's the foundation of every subject. Again, I can make a YouTube video about Windows sucks as a perspective of an astronomer but I would't since my philosophy is cross platform and frankly it's petty.

 

[ThunderSkunk]

I dunno how you guys got the idea that Autodesk software doesn't run on Macs, or only on Intel Macs. According to Autodesk, AutoCAD works under Rosetta and native Apple Silicon support is coming soon.

Because we’re talking about Professional level software. Realtime rendering large multipart parametric 3d solid model assemblies in Inventor Pro, Revit, Solidworks & Catia as well.

If you just want to tinker in Autocad, Fusion, or Maya, those run on macs natively, and there are more up-to-date alternatives to each of those by now that are free or next to it. I visited a shop recently who requested models in acad2k format. Their draftsmen were working on old dells running XP, and all their work looked like it. …not what the students are paying $1500/semester to learn.

 

[Lord Hamsa]

Any Thoughts or comments on the Forbes Article A STEM Degree Requires a Real PC see: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tirias...em-degree-requires-a-real-pc/?sh=50a0923378b8

This article states “While these Apple processors and PCs may be optimized for a wide variety of entertainment, productivity, and design applications, they are not optimized for many STEM applications. As I mentioned previously, it is difficult or sometimes impossible to run some STEM applications on x86-based laptops without a discrete GPU. It is even more of a challenge on a Mac because in my experience, the vast majority of STEM-oriented applications are written on and for x86-based PCs.”

I strongly disagree. A SOC Mac is more than capable and in my experience superior. What a STEM student requires is a laptop that they can write and run Python (and possibly R), write and run MatLab (and possibly Mathematica) and spreadsheet with plotting. What a student does NOT need is to be battling an operating system, fighting with configuration management and constantly worrying about viruses, malware and ransomware. And a battery that last longer than 40 minutes, is really useful too.

Seems like the article’s authors [Falsely] believes student need a gaming machine to do STEM course work.

Any other thoughts?

My eldest started at Virginia Tech this week. The recommended laptop specs absolutely do not require a discrete GPU, in fact graphics is the one area he felt he could skimp on.

That said, it DID need to be a PC because that's the platform the software bundle is targeted to; they specifically say Macs won't run all of the software needed.

 

[s1oplus]

Any Thoughts or comments on the Forbes Article A STEM Degree Requires a Real PC see: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tirias...em-degree-requires-a-real-pc/?sh=50a0923378b8

This article states “While these Apple processors and PCs may be optimized for a wide variety of entertainment, productivity, and design applications, they are not optimized for many STEM applications. As I mentioned previously, it is difficult or sometimes impossible to run some STEM applications on x86-based laptops without a discrete GPU. It is even more of a challenge on a Mac because in my experience, the vast majority of STEM-oriented applications are written on and for x86-based PCs.”

I strongly disagree. A SOC Mac is more than capable and in my experience superior. What a STEM student requires is a laptop that they can write and run Python (and possibly R), write and run MatLab (and possibly Mathematica) and spreadsheet with plotting. What a student does NOT need is to be battling an operating system, fighting with configuration management and constantly worrying about viruses, malware and ransomware. And a battery that last longer than 40 minutes, is really useful too.

Seems like the article’s authors [Falsely] believes student need a gaming machine to do STEM course work.

Any other thoughts?

What is this? The nintendo switch e-shop? How does this require such power that it needs a dedicated gpu?

 

[Ethosik]

Wait what? AutoCAD is getting a Mac port?

Well that's news to me. I had no idea since the program hasn't been on Mac for years.

It has been on there for a while now. I used it a while back on a Mac.

https://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/autocad-release-history.html

AutoCAD for Mac Releases:

AutoCAD for Mac June 1992
AutoCAD for Mac R13
AutoCAD 2011 for Mac October 2010 (SledgeHammer)
AutoCAD 2012 for Mac August 2011 (Iron Maiden)
AutoCAD LT 2012 for Mac August 2011 (Ferris)
AutoCAD LT 2013 for Mac August 2012
AutoCAD 2013 for Mac March 2012 (Jaws)
AutoCAD LT 2014 for Mac
AutoCAD 2014 for Mac codename Sandstone
AutoCAD 2015 for Mac codename Lightsaber
AutoCAD 2016 for Mac codename Mandalore
AutoCAD 2017 for Mac codename Naboo
AutoCAD 2018 for Mac codename Obi-Wan Nov 2017
AutoCAD 2019 for Mac codename Padme
AutoCAD 2020 for Mac codename Qui-Gon
AutoCAD 2021 for Mac codenameRogue March 2020
AutoCAD 2022 for Mac codename Sequoia March 2021

 

[!!!]

Any Thoughts or comments on the Forbes Article A STEM Degree Requires a Real PC see: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tirias...em-degree-requires-a-real-pc/?sh=50a0923378b8

This article states “While these Apple processors and PCs may be optimized for a wide variety of entertainment, productivity, and design applications, they are not optimized for many STEM applications. As I mentioned previously, it is difficult or sometimes impossible to run some STEM applications on x86-based laptops without a discrete GPU. It is even more of a challenge on a Mac because in my experience, the vast majority of STEM-oriented applications are written on and for x86-based PCs.”

I strongly disagree. A SOC Mac is more than capable and in my experience superior. What a STEM student requires is a laptop that they can write and run Python (and possibly R), write and run MatLab (and possibly Mathematica) and spreadsheet with plotting. What a student does NOT need is to be battling an operating system, fighting with configuration management and constantly worrying about viruses, malware and ransomware. And a battery that last longer than 40 minutes, is really useful too.

Seems like the article’s authors [Falsely] believes student need a gaming machine to do STEM course work.

Any other thoughts?

STEM is a large field and using Python and R are not the only things people do.

CAD software, for instance, generally does not run on Mac. Neither does a ton of niche software that hasn't been updated in a decade. Yes, you do need to use certain software to pass the class sometimes.


Apple's disregard for backwards compatibility is harming it in this case, and they don't seem interested in fixing it because it doesn't make them money. The software isn't on the App Store and Apple can't take a cut of whatever subscription, so they don't really care. That's just the way it is now, unfortunately.

 

[Tagbert]

In a STEM degree you do more than just programming. What about mechanical/PCB/FPGA hardware design?

Sure. The point is that just saying “STEM“ doesn’t indicate whether you need any specific type or level of computer. Some areas need Windows to run very specific software. Others don’t. Some need GPUs. Others don’t. It’s just handwaving and FUD without the specifics.

 

[xantufrog]

I run a lab at a major STEM school - most of my students use Macs, some Thinkpads for their personal machines, and our workstations and compute run on Linux. We do, however use windows gaming laptops or desktops with discrete GPUs running Windows for VR and other rendering work.

 

[ArkSingularity]

I had a Mac when I was a student. On the rare occasions that I had no choice but to use Windows, the school provided plenty of machines that could get the job done (granted, I was in a field where this was feasible, since the majority of our schoolwork could be done on just about any machine).

There were situations when we needed specialized hardware. We did need discreet GPUs on a couple of occasions, and we used university hardware when we did. They were usually pretty good about making sure that people had provisions for what they needed.

There are always exceptions, but to try to group all STEM fields into one group and to characterize Macs as unsuitable seems like a hasty generalization.

 

[Tagbert]

It does bring up a good point it's shocking that AutoCAD and other design software isn't on macOS.

Funny because my first exposure to AutoCAD was on an Apple II.

 

[casperes1996]

Depends on your STEM degree I think. I can say as a computer scientist at least that I got through both my bachelor and master's degree with Macs just fine - and about 70% of the students and professors were also using Macs

 

[Shirasaki]

I graduated from University of Sydney as Electrical Engineer and I used a Windows PC for everything related. The 11” MacBook Air I had was just insufficient to do tasks efficiently. Underpowered hardware and small screen. Amazing to take to school for taking notes however, and had battery to last while using computers in uni libraries. What a time.
Will Mac continue its own niche in the decade ahead? Or will they branch out into something more? Who knows. What I do know is Windows still provides the best compatibility in terms of software support. You certainly can get away without using a PC (depending on your needs), but if there’s a platform you can rely on that catches almost every need you can think of, Windows still wins the race By a large margin.

wow

Back on the topic, my daughter is a senior in HS, and she's considering STEM, I've been expecting to buy a MacBook and I do think that's what we'll be buying but its interesting to see that this may not be the case.

I prefer Windows machines for a variety of reasons, but I think the MBP would be such a better laptop for her, I hope the PC isn't a requirement for her. Otherwise, I may be getting tech support phone calls from her

Time to learn how to deploy Windows S image so she couldn’t do much of anything that’s unrelated to her study .
Joke aside, I believe she must have made her mind already.

 

[maflynn]

I believe she must have made her mind already.

She's entering her senior year and no, while she has a short list of schools, there's not one college that grabbed her.

 

[theluggage]

STEM is a large field and using Python and R are not the only things people do.

...which is why it is nonsense to make general statements like "You need a computer of type X for STEM" let alone "You must turn up on day #1 of a STEM degree course with a computer type X". Even if "X" is "Windows PC" that doesn't mean its going to be suitable for every specialist application - and if the course requires specialist applications then the school should either provide suitable equipment in labs or make it very clear, up front, what students need to bring.

Apple's disregard for backwards compatibility is harming it in this case, and they don't seem interested in fixing it because it doesn't make them money

This isn't about "backwards compatibility" it is all about "x86 compatibility" - usually Windows and sometimes with a side helping of CUDA. The only thing Apple could do to "fix" that is to throw away all of the advantages of Apple Silicon and go back to making PC clones with nicer trackpads - for a small and shrinking niche of users who (a) need to run x86 software but (b) don't need specific hardware, such as GPUs.

If a PC is the best tool for the job, get a PC as well as/instead of a Mac. If you really need a powerful GPU then a Mac Laptop has never made sense - even in the "good old days" of Intel Macs.