Should I get a MacBook Pro for my upcoming engineering courses?

Ask the department at the school you will be attending.

if they are Mac-hostile, it will make your life MUCH more difficult if all you have is a modern Mac that can not run Windows.

If you need a computer with more than typical compute-power, time on a lab machine will be made available during your course-work.

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The MacBook Pro is a lightweight, portable computer that can run on batteries. Being portable, it can easily be subjected to multi-G forces daily, just by being moved about in a completely ordinary way. This is extremely stressful to electro-mechanical equipment. The display is made of glass, the internals are very likely to die if water is spilled on the keyboard. 

Because of this, you should ALWAYS purchase the extended warranty coverage for such a portable device, regardless of whether you intend to move it about.

Based on our family's real world experience, the greater question is not "which Mac," but rather "Mac or Windows?"

My son made it through ~80% of Computer Engineering school with a Mac with the department's blessing. Several years in, the coursework changed, involving apps that were not available for Mac; his Macbook Pro did not have the resources to run a virtual machine. He had to buy a Windows computer to finish.

The need for a Win computer did not exist at the time he enrolled. When he started. he was told that a Mac should do fine. Then a professor for several of the senior-level courses decided to bring in new Win-only apps that did not exist when my son enrolled.

Fortunately, the 1st City Bank of Mom & Dad smiled favorably on his request for funds.

My point is that things can change after you begin your course of study. As much as I love my Macs, were my son to do it over, I would have started him with a Win computer.

Today he is an engineer for one of the largest manufacturers of RAM and flash storage, and all that company's internal software is Win-based. Because he got up to speed with this Win computer at school, the transition was easy.

To be honest, I think you would be fine with the M2 Pro chip, it will still outperform the Windows counterparts. I can understand the 1TB storage for longevity and would maybe consider the 16" model for more screen space since it is only a couple of hundred more for the same configuration.

hannahcrowder wrote:

Hello! I am going to start engineering courses this fall and I am going to get a computer before college.

I strongly agree with the advice that you should ask the department. Also, if you are not currently eligible for an education discount, you may want to wait to purchase the computer until you get to college where you are quite likely to be eligible for a discount.

Expanding on what Idris Seabright suggested, ask your school!

• Some schools have purchase arrangements that can provide even deeper discounts than Apple does.

• Some schools can provide grants or allowances toward a computer purchase, either outright or as part of financial aid.

It really depends. "Engineering" is a rather broad category. I do remember running some basic HDL simulators and they ran pretty well on a Mac, but I needed to install Homebrew. But then it really matters what you need to run. A lot of engineering is really just accessing remote servers and using some sort of terminal window. But sometimes it's really nice to have a power local computer to do stuff.