By Alex Geli –
As William Shakespeare once said, “Oh laptops, where art thou laptops?”
Okay, maybe that wasn’t The Great Bard of Stratford himself, but rather parents all over the nation.
Now is the time where moms and dads can be found scurrying around stores like Best Buy, Radioshack and Circuit City for laptops. Why the outbreak of these wide-eyed head-scratchers? They are trying to find one of these cutting edge gizmos for their soon-to-be high school graduating offspring. Starting now and going on through June, these creatures will be on the hunt for the perfect thinking machine.
So the decision is… Mac? PC? Tablet? The argument can go on for days.
“It depends,” said technology teacher Nick Crowther. If my son or daughter is going into graphics, then I’d get a Mac. If my son or daughter is going into computer programming or if he/she is a gamer, then I’d get a PC.”
“(Personally,) I’m a Mac guy,” said Crowther. “Since I teach web design and animation every day, I’m comfortable with them.
A junior, Matthew Weidinger, is also on the Mac band wagon.
“I would get a Macbook Pro because it’s reliable,” he said, “and it’ll last you a good ten years before you have to do anything to upgrade it.”
During a scuffle with the two different viewpoints, Weidinger and senior Zane Sensenig put out their opinion at the lunch table on a silver platter containing Italian cheese pizza, fresh fruit and their choice of laptop.
“Yeah, and he also has to pay three times the amount of what he’s getting,” Sensenig said.
After Weidinger pointed out that a Macbook Pro can be bought off of Craigslist for cheap, Sensenig fired right back.
“I could get a brand new one for less than what you’re paying-” Sensenig said before getting cut off.
“-Well it’ll be crap,” Weidinger intervened, “and most likely it’ll break within two years and you’ll have to buy a new one.”
Crowther, though, had to agree with Sensenig on that point.
“Macs are very expensive,” he said, noting that you could get a PC for cheaper while having “similar processing.”
Sensenig, Zach Sheaffer – who are both seniors, are not only rooming together, but majoring in Web Development at Pennsylvania College of Technology next year – and Nick Weidinger – another senior of Crowther’s animation class – have a slightly different take: PC all the way.
“Windows is just more customizable,” Sheaffer said.
“(A PC) is more of a productive computer,” Sensenig said. “Graphic design? All for Macs.”
He and Sheaffer combined their knowledge about computers and their passion towards PC’s to articulate this statement: “Macs are for people who are novice computer users.”
Currently, Sheaffer has an HP Pavilion but said he is going to get another laptop for college.
“I don’t know what I want yet. (All I know is that) I want the top of the line,” he added.
He also is going to get a PC desktop for their dorm room “with two Acer monitors.”
Sensenig, on the other hand, does not currently own a laptop, but is going to get one for graduation, he said. Not having one specific kind in mind, he has the specs all planned out.
“It should have at least 4 gigabytes of RAM, aka memory, a 500 gigabyte hard drive, an ability to have a video card added to it and at least a quad core processor,” Sensenig laid out.
“No netbooks (though),” he added. “Netbooks are trash. You might as well get an iPad because they’re essentially a netbook. They just do ‘it’ better and it’s more fun to use.”
Nick (Weidinger) is more comfortable with PC’s and “fancy” them over Macs.
Actually…
“I would fancy anything…,” he said, then catching himself.
“… anything that’s not a Mac.”
Here is the list provided by Amazon.com of the “Most Wished For in Laptop Computers.”
Choose wisely, parents.
PC > Mac
That will be all.
Personally I think Mac’s are terrible I dont like the way there Built and the set up is bad as well I would just go for a simpler computer such as a PC
Its better and its the best PC will always be the best and Apple will never steal the fame of PC
From the standpoint of a power user, I believe that a user’s need for a laptop for college totally depends on what they will be doing with the machine. Windows machines are well-suited for productivity and can be considered an industry standard; Macs are very expensive but stable and are well suited for graphics work and video production. Windows PCs can be cheaply built and unreliable in both the aspects of hardware and software. More Windows machines are brought to me with reliability issues than all of the Macs that I have ever serviced. Personally, I use a Mac for my main machine, and PCs as a desktop and servers for more serious work.
Matt is soo wrong about not needing to upgrade his mac for 10 years. That’s ridiculous with how fast technology is expanding. His ten year old mac will be more outdated than those computers that took up an entire room back in the 60s. He just sounds very ignorant in this entire article.