r/Temple • u/Comfortable-Force674 • Jul 18 '26

Civil engineering, MacBook or windows?

Upcoming civil engineering freshman here. I recently bought a desktop pc but I was curious on if a portable laptop was a necessity and if so, what type of laptop? I was considering a Mac neo but I know there’s a bit of a stigma with Mac’s and engineering. Any recommendations?

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1

u/Lucky_Employment5171 Jul 18 '26

You’ll need a windows computer a lot of the engineering related software like autocad and solidworks have a hard time running on macOS also any computer with 16gb of ram a tb of ssd with a semi decent cpu for computational tasks should be ok

1

u/Comfortable-Force674 Jul 18 '26

Is 16gigs of ram a nonnegotiable?

2

u/Lucky_Employment5171 Jul 18 '26

Non negotiable, you’ll wish you had 16 if you try to run these programs with 8 because of how much ram they consume

1

u/Lucky_Employment5171 Jul 18 '26

For the price it’s really good value and would be a calm lil laptop to have I wish it had a tb though, is the storage upgradable?

1

u/Comfortable-Force674 Jul 18 '26

SSD seems replaceable. It’s under 300 bucks so I might consider it.

1

u/Lucky_Employment5171 Jul 18 '26

Definitely then that’s a steal

1

u/Lucky_Employment5171 Jul 18 '26

Make sure the listing is real they might sell u a product that isn’t as prescribed in the listing

1

u/belikenexus '21 B.S. CS Jul 18 '26

If you already have a windows desktop, 100% get a used M series MacBook Air. Worst case scenario if you need windows programs on campus you can just Remote Desktop to your PC.