Best Apple Mac for Students. Whats the best Mac for Students, which is good for College? Even though it’s entirely possible to get through college without a laptop, college students and professors alike know how helpful a good laptop can be. The 13-inch MacBook Pro is a top pick for college students because of its excellent cross of price, performance, battery life, features, and support. The best laptop for your student.
Tom Brant Which MacBook Should You Buy? Apple's MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air share similarly impressive, iconic designs, but which one delivers the right balance of power and value for what you do? Here's how they rank in our testing. Picking the Right Apple My hands were clammy with excitement one July day a little more than a decade ago as I obsessively refreshed the FedEx website to watch a very special shipment make its way from Suzhou in China's Jiangsu province to my home in Oregon, where I was eagerly awaiting the arrival of perhaps the most exciting graduation gift a college-bound kid at the time could hope for: a shiny white first-generation MacBook with an Intel Core Duo processor and 1GB of memory. A lot has changed since those anticipatory days I waited for my package to arrive. Aside from the obvious fact that the $1,289 worth of graduation money I spent on my Core Duo MacBook will get you far better components today, the sheer amount of choice in the Apple laptop line today would have boggled my high school brain.
![What Is The Best Mac For College What Is The Best Mac For College](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125632734/679304119.jpg)
Of course, that choice pales when compared with what's available to Windows shoppers, but if you have your heart set on a Mac, you'll almost certainly find a machine to fit your needs. Here's what to look forward to, as well as some pitfalls to avoid. The MacBook: The Smallest Pick There are vast differences between the first MacBook (the one I bought soon after it went on sale in 2006) and the. Apple stopped selling the MacBook for several years while it completely revamped the design, and the result is stunning. Reintroduced in 2016 in its current form, the MacBook is a marvel of engineering that has spawned many clones. The first thing you notice about it is the diminutive stature.
Not only is the 12-inch screen on the small side, since most consumer these days have 13.3-inch displays, but the chassis itself is achingly thin and light at just 0.52 by 11.04 by 7.74 inches (HWD). It's Apple's smallest laptop, and if you can stomach the small screen size, it's the best choice for road warriors and couch potatoes, but not people who will use it on a desk all day.
A small size doesn't mean the MacBook's screen is low quality. Despite the fact that it's not the highest-resolution 12-inch display you can buy, the LED panel impresses with its brightness and clarity. The native resolution is 2,304 by 1,440, which results in a 16:10 aspect ratio that's slightly shorter and wider than your TV. The display uses In-Plane Switching (IPS) technology, which means that the remarkable picture you see while sitting in front of it doesn't degrade much if you turn it to show a colleague what you're working on.
Still, it doesn't seem quite as bright as the screens on the 13-inch or 15-inch MacBook Pro, because its backlight is rated at 340 nits, compared with 500 nits on the MacBook Pros. It also doesn't provide the wide P3 color gamut that you'll get from the Pro screens, so it's not a great choice for multimedia color correction. To fit everything into the small enclosure, Apple made a few sacrifices in terms of the MacBook's connectivity and power. The most limiting factor is the single USB-C port, which handles every connection other than audio output, from charging to connecting an external display or hard drive.
You will almost certainly need to buy a third-party expansion dock with additional ports if you choose the MacBook. Also limiting is the Intel Core m3 processor in the base configuration. It's fine for tasks like watching web videos and editing text documents, but it could struggle with multitasking, and will certainly balk at demanding requests like transcoding video files or applying filters in. Fortunately, if you're wedded to the MacBook's tininess, you can spend some extra money to max out the key specs, up to an Intel Core i7, 16GB of memory, and a 512GB (SSD). The MacBook is an ideal travel companion, and given its sleek styling and Apple's cachet, a bit of a status symbol to boot.
But since you'll spend at least $1,299 on it, you'll want to at least consider other larger Apple portables that offer more power and connectivity. The MacBook vs. The MacBook Pro The closest Apple alternative to the MacBook is the entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Both machines have identical starting prices for their base configurations ($1,299), but in return for a bit of extra bulk you get a more powerful Core i5 processor. In fact, every processor available on the MacBook Pro is more powerful than the equivalent CPU on the MacBook, since the MacBook ones have lower clock speeds that let them consume less power and generate less heat. On the other hand, the base-model MacBook Pro has a 128GB SSD, a paltry amount of storage in 2018 that you'll quickly outgrow if you have a large photo library or a modest collection of digital movies. Specs aside, the physical superiority of the 13-inch MacBook Pro over the MacBook is its key selling point. You get a second USB-C port and a larger screen, which means you might get away without buying a docking station and will spend much less time squinting to read small text. All of that fits into a slightly larger and heavier chassis: 0.59 by 11.97 by 8.36 inches and 3.02 pounds.
Out of the entire MacBook family, this is without question the model that most consumers should buy to use as their everyday workhorse, and as such it is our current Editors' Choice award winner for best Mac laptop. Now that you know our top pick, you could very well stop reading here, but I hope you don't. There's a unique aspect to the more expensive MacBook Pro models that you must consider if the 'Pro' part of the name applies to you: the Touch Bar. This long, thin, touch-enabled OLED screen mounted above the keyboard on all 15-inch MacBook Pros and higher-end 13-inch ones is unique and highly specialized. It's Apple's answer to touch gestures in Windows 10, and it's most useful in professional apps like the Adobe Creative Suite and, which let you use the Touch Bar to scrub through a video timeline, switch tool selections, and much more. The Touch Bar is not a substitute for the touch screens that you'll find on many Windows ultraportables, however.
You cannot use it to interact with basic screen elements like the menu buttons on websites, nor can you use it to draw on the screen. An or a are your best alternatives for these tasks. If you are a multimedia professional who might benefit from the Touch Bar, you'll need to consider whether you want the 13-inch or the 15-inch MacBook Pro.
The factors to consider here are more than just the two extra inches, which help push the 15-incher's weight above 4 pounds. You also need to decide whether you need the extra graphics horsepower that a discrete GPU can provide. If you're a video or photo editor, you'll want to strongly consider the 15-inch model with an AMD Radeon Pro graphics card, which can speed up editing tasks even though it's not powerful enough for high-quality gaming. The 13-inch model only comes with Intel integrated graphics. Typing and Clicking Now that you've amassed the above laundry list of specs to decide on, the rest is easy, since pretty much every other attribute is the same across all Apple laptops. They all have the same excellent, oversized glass touchpads with virtual 'haptic' feedback instead of a physical click mechanism. This increases reliability, lets you click anywhere on the pad with the same feedback, and even lets you disable the click completely and change other parameters in the System Preferences app.
![What is the best mac for college students What is the best mac for college students](http://www.laptopmag.com/images/wp/laptop-landing/thumb/319636.jpg)
No Windows laptop we've tested comes close to this level of touchpad luxury. Each Apple laptop also has the same type of keyboard, with ultra-low-profile key switches that extend and retract like a butterfly flapping its wings.
It's a unique and polarizing feature. Some praise the stability and satisfyingly deep clicking sound that the keys make, while others lament the extremely shallow travel. Whether you love or hate the keyboard, you'll quickly get used to it, and if you're a novelist or a gamer you should be investing in a larger external keyboard for most of your typing, anyway. The MacBook Air: Refreshed for '18 There's only one Apple laptop that you should avoid if possible: the 2017, which you can still buy at this writing. This model was once the pinnacle of thin-and-light laptop designs, but it hasn't changed much since it was introduced more than a decade ago. That means both the MacBook and 13-inch MacBook Pro are now thinner than the Air, as are many Windows laptops.
Even worse, the 2017 Air's specs are stuck in the past too, with an Intel processor that's several generations old. The good news is that there's a new MacBook Air on the block, and it's excellent. Though no speedster, the has a Retina Display and an up-to-date Intel processor, making it a sleek ultraportable laptop worthy of its pioneering predecessor's name. Unfortunately, at a starting price of $1,299, it's also more expensive than its predecessor. That pricing puts it in the zone, too, of the straight-up MacBook, so a choice between the MacBook Air and the non-Air MacBook should be based on your desire for a bigger screen (Air) or a smaller, lighter laptop (non-Air).
The 2018 MacBook Air has also graduated to the same keyboard as the rest of the current Apple laptop line, so that's no longer a differentiator; the 2017 model was the last holdout with Apple's classic board. Perhaps given that pricing overlap with the non-Air MacBook, Apple continues to sell the old MacBook Air at a starting price of $999, which makes it the cheapest Apple portable you can buy. If you absolutely must have a Mac at the cheapest price, it's an option, but only if you are ruling out all similarly priced Windows competitors. In fact, ruling out Windows brings us to the final consideration for prospective Apple laptop owners: They all run. This simple, powerful operating system was the single biggest draw for me when deciding on my first, and that remains the case for millions of students. Others vehemently disagree, of course, but don't forget that all Macs can run too, either from a separate hard drive partition that Apple makes easy to set up or via emulation software like Parallels. The upshot is that if you are a fan of Apple's superb design and craftsmanship, you can buy one of the company's laptops even if you need or want to use Microsoft's operating system.
Investing in the Future So, what happened to that white-plastic first-generation MacBook I bought in high school? It lasted for three years before I traded it in for a similar model with Intel's upgraded Core 2 Duo processor.
That second machine is still ticking away thanks to a few key upgrades, including replacing the hard drive with an SSD and doubling the RAM. I performed these upgrades myself in less than 30 minutes, something that is impossible with current Apple laptops, which have chassis that are sealed shut. I'm sad that Apple has turned a cold shoulder toward tinkerers, forcing people who want to future-proof their laptops to spend a lot of money maxing out the specs at purchase instead of upgrading later when the prices of components come down. Pros: Retina Display offers vivid colors. Very comfortable Force Touch trackpad.
Secure boot capability. Two Thunderbolt 3 ports. Excellent battery life. Cons: No CPU configuration options. Y-series, not U-series, CPU. No touch screen. No USB Type-A ports or dedicated video output.
Shallow key travel. Expensive as configured. Occasional fan noise.
Bottom Line: Though no speedster, the refreshed MacBook Air finally gets a Retina Display and updated components, making it a sleek ultraportable laptop worthy of its pioneering predecessor's name.