I am currently a high school senior and I am planning on going to college in the fall. My parents are going to buy me a laptop, but they are thinking about a Dell and I want a Mac. We agreed that if I want the Macbook, I will have to pay the difference. In order to save money and make my loss as small as possible, I am looking into refurbished 13" Macbook Pro's. I found one that I think I want, but it has 750GB Serial ATA @ 5400 rpm and the more expensive ones have 128-768GB of flash storage. This is really the only difference that I can find and I was wondering if less flash storage is better than more...whatever the other thing is. Also, as a student, is there any other things that I would need or should look into in regards to a laptop? I am planning on going into Biological Engineering.
Thank you!!
Kayla
I have looked at the air, and I wasn't a huge fan because it did not have enough (if any) USB ports. I know I want to stick with a Pro, it is just which one I want to get is the question.
Also, I'm a girl
The fact that you're a girl is irrelevant to the question of which computer you would need. I personally would recommend a 15" MBP. Why? because even though the 13" is more than capable and a powerful machine, the screen real estate is less and the 15" has a GPU with its own dedicated memory. This makes for better performance when working with graphics programs/applications(I would assume that you would need this for biological engineering rendering applications and research). And if your degree will have anything to do with DNA(which I would imagine it would), you'll need the GPU to help with DNA sequencing applications.
I would also go with the one that still has the superdrive for installing software not available through the Mac App Store, for movies and other data/media you might need, and also in case you want to instal Windows XP/Vista/7 on there if your school engineering department requires certain Windows-only programs.
The 15" will also utilize more RAM.
For the most part, that's it. I would recommend a really good eReader that can download various document formats for classes that you might take online or for classes whose professors like to distribute extra reading. I use my iPad mini for all my online class reading lists and even download and convert .doc, .docx, and .pages documents into ePub formats for easier searching and bookmarking.