. As many have said above, call the department and ask if they have a recommendation. Ask the advisors and other office staff. They know all the ins and outs and are usually super easy to talk with.
Who said anything about OpenCoreLegacy? Mojave runs just fine on any intel Mac from 2012 to 2019 (mostly). (I loathe and despise all the OSes from Catalina onward, so have little reason to desire using OCL anyway.) And Mint, PopOS!, and plenty of other Linux distros will run just fine on "old" Macs. The MBP'14 had (or at least mine has) 16gb ram, a 500gb SSD, three USB3 ports, a DVD drive, and an HDMI port (grabbed a used 50" smart-TV off FBM for $40 to use as a monitor). Unlike the M-series laptops, everything inside is user-serviceabe. Buy a USBC-USB3 plug for ten bucks when and if you finally need one for something.
Listen to the preacher-man. You do not need a dragster to get the groceries. 98% of students and 97-and-a-half% of faculty would give you a blank stare if you asked them what requires the most horsepower from a computer. (Answer: graphic-rendering. Virtually nothing else requires even a tenth of the oomph. So, if you're not ripping blu-rays or massaging 4k video, literally anything from a pawn-shop will do...well, maybe not from a pawn-shop.) 16gb is nice if your desktop machine has a rotational-drive; 8gb is plenty in a laptop with an SSD. (Tip: delete any Adobe, Microsoft, and Google stuff out of the Library > Launch folders. Reprise: do not buy subscription-model software.)
Get a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Nano. For business/finance, you want a Windows computer. CFA and MBA speaking here not the computer. Every business/finance application is available on Windows and not or worse on Mac. For example, Excel is much better on Windows. In addition, the Thinkpad keyboard is far superior. Not as bright of a display, but good enough.
Get a Windows laptop if youāre serious about finance. Excel on Macbooks is nutered. Although youāll probably not spend too much time in a professional environment so it might be flexible.
Dating myself a bit but my college machine as a 9ā Macintosh SE with two floppy drives. I couldnāt afford a hard disk drive.
My wife had a Mac SE with a 20 meg hard drive and chock full of viruses she got at a yard sale. She kept coming back to the computer lab because there was a worker there she liked. I kept telling her how to remove the viruses, but she kept showing up anyway š.
Umm. Why? I used a 2013 MBp with 16 gigs of RAM until 2021. I think storage is important. The horsepower of an m2 or m3 is plenty, unless they start doing hard Core Video compression, 3D rendering, or games in which case a PC is better with a 4090 anyway.
It just amazes me that people phrase advice for 2024-2028 needs of a college student around statements like "I used a 2013 MBp with 16 gigs of RAM until 2021." The question is what computer product will be most future appropriate. A better statement might be something like: I used a maxed MBP 2013-2021, get a maxed 2023-2024 MBP.
You do not need a "business" or "finance" degree, or any other multi-year waste-of-time certification to run excel. If running excel is the sort of cubicle-hell position that awaits you upon graduation, that's your cue that "higher"-education has become a monstrous scam. (Once upon a time still within the living memory of some, this sort of work was done by people called "secretaries". Job requirements were having a pleasant demeanor and not making too many typos in correspondence.)
Note that, on a campus, you will not be making those potential connections while inside a classroom, but instead everywhere else on campus. So, you could get a PT job right now near a college, then stop by after work to schmooz at various hangouts.
What he said, save for the tiny correction of replacing the word "business" with "all". (Books: see "Bachelorpad Economics" and "Worthless" by Aaron Clarey. There's PDFs and etexts of them out there awaiting the diligent searcher.) And be wary of "recruitment seminars"; those things are a pestilence.
Interesting take on a uni education. Personally I disagree 100%, and think that education is a worthy goal on its own that has value far more important than simple commerce. Note that part of the uni value is the exposure to a range of courses (core course requirements) and exposure to folks studying other fields of endeavor.
The most useful tool you can use is the one the manufacturer hasn't deliberately engineered with unresolvable fail-points that kick in after the warranties have expired. (Repeat for the hundreth time: Do not buy any Apple laptop made after 2015, or any device in general that requires you to be connected to an online account just to do basic office stuff.)
Where Apple wants things to go is the same as where Ford also wants them to go, and it's why dealerships are stuffed with $85,000 planned-obsolescence trucks with plastic intake-manifolds that nobody is buying.
They are, by staying home in droves. (Today's hobby tricks: Buy huge box full of 2011 MBPs from recycler for $10 a pop. Buy stack of used SATA SSDs from same for $2ea. Put SSDs in MBPs. Install Linux, and run 2024 LibreOffice in 4gb of ram with bleed-over into 256gb of SSD cache-memory. More ram is a luxury, but you'd be surprised how little you actually need when the operating-system and major applications aren't 90% data-mining spyware.)
The #1 ulterior goal of universities from the 90's onward is student-debt creation, not education.
From the '90s onward, universities are an impediment to education, not a facilitator of it. You'll learn far, far more, far quicker, on forums like this place, and there are multiple forums for every topic under the sun.
You don't actually need to attend classes to get "exposure" at a U.
You should join me in dissuading the OP from pursuing a 100% worthless business-finance degree. Those are pure Franklin bonfires.
Newer is not necessarily better, especially regarding display comfort and safety.
ledstrain.org
As a prof you should know better than to assume that what worked in 2023 will be appropriate in 2027+, which is the time frame specified by the OP. Even if you are teaching LA courses (which I do not denigrate) you should read up on Apple's [superb] Unified Memory Architecture and also on where AI seems to be going.
Off topic though. Heās asking for equipment advice. Thereās probably another forum for the best life choices, with as many opinions as there are participants
Same goes for iMacs: the 2009-2014 standard 1440p 2K displays were a pleasure to use (the 27" Thundrbolt monitors had the same resolution), but the Retinas that followed were too harsh for many, and the XDRs from 2019+ are even worse. The human eyeball is not mounted on a platform evolved to stoop on field-mice from a thousand feet up, and your body lets you know when it's being subjected to the visual equivalent of thrash-metal.
Allen, if the *professor* teaching the classes doesn't use or need or expect 128gb ram (not storage) or even an eighth of that in his own personal computer, I'm not seeing a rational argument for suggesting that he tell his students to bring in thousand-dollar high-end platforms. We're in an economic phase right now where these things are massively overpriced versus the needs required of them. You do not a dragster to get the groceries, and you do not need portable teraFLOPS to type, browse, calculate, or watch x265 rips.
The future being what, four years down the road after the extended-warranty has expired, the shipped-with OS is no longer officially supported, and the impossible-to-repair-or-transfer soldered-on components are failing?
Aside from the 1 TB now being an SSD, that's not much bang for the buck -- its near the same resolution (2560 x 1600) and RAM of a 2014 MBP (larger screen), but with improvements in processor and circuitry speed disappearing down the maw of Microsoft's greatly-increased telemetry. And Win11 is and remains a horrible operating-system.
In other words, pay a subscription for the privilege of backing up to someone else's hard-drive array (that being exactly what the "cloud" is: your stuff on the NSA's server-farm out in Utah or wherever; this is the very antonym of "secure".) Better: learn how to make a bootable backup of your laptop's drive to a USB external.
Education can be earned anywhere now. Used to be it was only available at a college. But the truth is one can read books and get a better education, and like the other poster said get a part-time job near a university and develop relationships.
Partially true. But I have the advice originally that led to that and I started with a THINKPAD is better for business majors.Off topic though. Heās asking for equipment advice. Thereās probably another forum for the best life choices, with as many opinions as there are participants