College Tip

[Zarraya]

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I'm about to head off to college and was wondering if a MBA would suffice for a mechanical engineering major. I love the portability that it offers as well as the light weight. I would get max specs and wait till the supposed June update. Super drive yes and ethernet adapter yes.
Thanks

 

[bri1232001]

Chemical Engineering student here.

My new 13 inch MBA suits me very well but be ready to work with BootCamp or Parallels.

I use parallels for the windows only apps that I NEED to use. I don't do anything to processor intensive. It's great for writing papers and what not. When I need to run fluid simulations and models I move to a campus desktop that can really crunch some numbers.

The battery and portability are amazing. This is the first time I have carried a computer on me to class and whatnot. I am so happy with the purchase and I think you will be too.

 

[guitardave62000]

I am finishing up my Mechanical Engineering degree now and I would think that should be more then fine for schooling. I have the current 11" Air and love it. As the previous poster stated you will most likely need to use bootcamp or fusion to work with certain programs but a lot of that also depends on what school you go to and what programs they use. From my experience at least, most of the programs needed for simulations and computations are only available on school computers anyway.

 

[talmy]

Be sure to order it with 4GB of RAM. You will need it to run Parallels/Fusion acceptably well.

 

[e3mac]

It will definitely be great for use in-class and for any general purpose computing. However, I wouldn't expect to do any extremely complex 3D modeling (Pro-E, Solidworks, Catia) on it. Also, as guitardave stated, the air will also not be suitable for any analysis work but the school should have good workstations that you can use.


I am also an ME student and currently use Pro-E and Pro/Mechanica for modeling and analysis.

*For clarification* When I say analysis I mean a static stress analysis on a part or assembly