MacBook or Laptop? [emoji848]

[zehcnassurfero]

Hello, I am studying mechanical engineering and I want to buy a new laptop or MacBook, in some cases I need windows because there are some programs that there are only for windows.

But.... I prefer the ecosystem of Apple and Apple products because I have iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and I really don’t like windows.

I have some questions:

Do these macbooks really last as long as the previous ones?

I know that it’s possible to have windows on a MacBook, but does it run well?

In this case, Would I need more than 512GB?

Thank you!

 

[AjTee]

Yes.

Bootcamp or Parallels Desktop (My preference).

I have 512GB of SSD and this is enough.

 

[glenthompson]

I used to run Parallels so I could run Visual Studio and the Office suite. No performance problems on a 2011 MBP. You will need at least 16gb of ram. Disk space needed depends on what you need to store. Photos and videos can eat up a lot of space. If you're not doing much in that arena, 512 should be fine. Nothing to indicate that current models will be any less reliable. Any model can have a particular glitch.

 

[zehcnassurfero]

I used to run Parallels so I could run Visual Studio and the Office suite. No performance problems on a 2011 MBP. You will need at least 16gb of ram. Disk space needed depends on what you need to store. Photos and videos can eat up a lot of space. If you're not doing much in that arena, 512 should be fine. Nothing to indicate that current models will be any less reliable. Any model can have a particular glitch.

I use iCloud for photos and videos, so I think that 512GB it’s enough, but I was asking because of parallels or bootcamp, because I didn’t know if it would need so much SSD

Yes, of course, 16GB

 

[glenthompson]

I use iCloud for photos and videos, so I think that 512GB it’s enough, but I was asking because of parallels or bootcamp, because I didn’t know if it would need so much SSD

Yes, of course, 16GB

Bootcamp requires you to dedicate a certain amount of space for the Windows partition. With Parallels, the space is dynamic and will grow as needed. one nice feature of Parallels is being able to make multiple copies of the virtual machine so you can have test versions that you can trash if it messes up. Just keep one pristine VM archived that is only used to make new copies.

 

[cdcastillo]

Hello, I am studying mechanical engineering and I want to buy a new laptop or MacBook, in some cases I need windows because there are some programs that there are only for windows.

But.... I prefer the ecosystem of Apple and Apple products because I have iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and I really don’t like windows.

I have some questions:

Do these macbooks really last as long as the previous ones?

I know that it’s possible to have windows on a MacBook, but does it run well?

In this case, Would I need more than 512GB?

Thank you!

Hi, I'm in a similar situation to yours. I'm not a mechanical engineer student, but I need to use software exclusive to windows and I also do not like windows.

I do not know about the new laptops, I've been clinging to my 2015 MBP for dear life, fearing the keyboard debacle that plagued MacBook Pros from 2016 to 2019. Now that apple backtracked and the new 2020 keyboards seem to be reliable again, I've been considering replacing my laptop, but some of the software I rely on to earn money won't run on Catalina without a sizable investment.

I use VMware Fusion and windows runs smoothly on my 5 year old laptop. It sometimes gives me headaches (what with the unscheduled and intruding mandatory updates you can not cancel), but it is really worse on the Dell, Acer and HP laptops we also use from time to time. I cringe every time I have to use a windows laptop.

Depending on the extent of your disk use in windows you might need more than 512. I've recently upgraded the SSD in my MBP from 512 GB to 1 TB. Although to be honest, this has more to do with the Mac side of things (music, movies, and about 20 years of pictures, documents, archives and backups). So, you might be alright with 512 GB.

 

[jerryk]

I have concerned about recommending any Mac at this time for someone that must run Windows-based applications. The current products are likely to be the last x86 MacBooks. Hopefully, the emulation vendors will have a solution that runs on Apple Silicon Macs. But nothing is guaranteed at this time, and if new x86 Windows solutions appear we know nothing now about their performance and limitations of x86 support.