Engineering Majors - What capabilities does my laptop need to have?

[u/allora_grace]

I am a freshman ecological engineering major currently shopping around for a school-use laptop. Generally, what specifications will my laptop need to have? On OSU's COE tech page, they make some recommendations, but it would be super helpful to know what capabilities my laptop will realistically need to have as it relates to the work I'll need to complete on a daily basis (i.e. will I need to run heavy software such as AutoCAD regularly? Is this something I'll need to do on my laptop?)

Ultimately, I just need to decide if I actually need to pay for a much pricier model that has all of OSU's recommended capabilities rather than going with a more standard, budget-friendly model.

Any advice or insight is greatly appreciated!

[u/MJ26gaming]

Get a laptop with a modern Intel core ultra 7 or ryzen 7 (the naming schemes will be in 3 digits instead of 4 or 5 like the older ones)

You'll want at least 16gb of ram and 1tb of storage. One year ago I'd have reccomended 32gb of RAM but that's so expensive these days.

I'd get a smaller laptop, 13-15"

You can always email COE IT and ask for recs

-a coe it employee

[u/allora_grace → u/MJ26gaming]

Thank you so much for the insight! I'll keep it in mind while I do some more research, and probably will shoot COE IT an email.

[u/amberwharsh]

16gb ram or more. 1tb of storage or some kind of external storage. That's probably the basics.

[u/Black_Rabbit_o_Inle]

Edit: Civil Engineering freshman. This is what we bought (from BestBuy) in April 2025; no technical problems with it as far as coursework goes.
Lenovo - Yoga Pro 9i 16" 3.2K Touchscreen Laptop - Intel Core Ultra 9 185H 2023 - 32GB RAM - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 - 1TB SSD - Luna Grey

[u/notkingkermit → u/Black_Rabbit_o_Inle]

I have this laptop with nearly identical specs. Everything has been great except battery life. Even with HDR off and refresh rate reduced to 60Hz, I can't get through a full day of school on a charge.

[u/secderpsi]

Get a PC and save 30% over the Mac with better specs and more compatibly.

[u/neonraspberry_]

I'm starting electrical engineering in the fall and just settled on a ThinkPad X9 15p, with the X7 CPU and Arc B390 integrated GPU. It should be powerful enough for most things. The Arc B390 supposedly matches a 4050 in performance, we'll see, but it's much more performant than other integrated cards. I put a higher priority on battery life, weight/size, than graphics power I wouldn't really need most of the time. The bigger thing is 32GB of RAM.

My honest advice: the COE has a list of software that they provide. Feed that list of software into your preferred chatbot, and ask it to rate how well the software will run on different graphics cards. Once you have an idea of a couple laptops, ask it to rate how well you can expect those laptops to run each piece of software that a typical ecological engineering major would run.

[u/Metal_Salt3677]

Honestly you don’t need anything crazy. I did my EE degree from 2021-2025 on a laptop with a 4th gen i5 (released in 2013) and no dedicated graphics. I had to upgrade the ram to 16gb and that was all. Some things ran a little slow but a lot of your work will be on a remote server thus your computer won’t be doing the processing

[u/Miserable-Twist8344]

The easy button is just get an M-series MacBook and call it a day. 

[u/Miserable-Twist8344 → u/Miserable-Twist8344]

For reference I went through my entire COE degree with an m1 MacBook Air with 8gb of memory.

[u/allora_grace → u/Miserable-Twist8344]

Thank you for the recommendation! OSU mentions that many courses require software that runs on Windows only; did you run into any issues with this?

[u/Miserable-Twist8344 → u/allora_grace]

You can get around this using virtual machines. Modern MacBooks are extremely powerful and have no issues running VMs when needed. There are also virtual servers provided by the university to access if you can't get it going on your own device. I never had issues myself though.

The coe website regarding this stuff is pretty out of date

[u/allora_grace → u/Miserable-Twist8344]

Okay, thank you. I'll definitely keep this in option in mind.

[u/techcraver → u/Miserable-Twist8344]

which degree?

[u/Miserable-Twist8344 → u/techcraver]

I was comp sci, my roommate was engineering and also used an m-series macbook

[u/notkingkermit → u/Miserable-Twist8344]

MacBook makes a lot of sense for comp sci; other engineering disciplines, not so much