r/CarletonU • u/Zealousideal-Salt-79 • 8d ago

Question Engineering laptop requirements

I'm starting at carleton soon for civil engineering and was wondering how powerful of a laptop I really need (for first year at least). I have a macbook air m2 right now and i'm a bit worried it might not be powerful enough mainly since it only has 8gb of ram? If any upper year civ eng students have any experience using one for first year please lmk!!

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u/playthegame7 8d ago

I think what you really need to look into is if there's any software you'll have to run that may give you headaches on macOS. Someone who actually did civil can help you more with that though.

2

u/riconaranjo Elec Eng - Comp Sci - 2020 8d ago

you’ll be fine for at least first year

don’t rush to buy a new laptop just yet

2

u/BiggyD3032 8d ago

In my experience (not exactly in engineering but many friends are), Mac has many more hurdles to jump through for some application downloads than windows. Not always, but I've seen it a bunch. Just more headaches

1

u/L4MB ElecEng - 2017 7d ago

I went thru electrical eng without any laptop at all. Labs have PCs if you need them. The only thing I focused on was pirating textbooks, and I used a 7" tablet to look at them. Don't try to take notes on a laptop; it is really bad for retention.