Macbook for medical student?

I can answer as a fellow medical student using a MacBook Pro. Looking around during lectures I see at least 50% Macs. Our best professors (read best lectures, generating the most interesting papers in research etc) all use Macs. The ones that have Macs never need to call tech support to show their presentations. They also show videos, simulations, etc on them with no hickups.

I write all the lecture notes on my Mac using Pages and OmniGraffle. I do my presentations on a Mac using Keynote. I work as a psychotherapist in addition - I do all my leaflets etc on the Mac using Pages, and run my practice on the Mac using iCal, TimeLog and a Swiss accounting system (Loops). I train reading CT and MRI scans using OsiriX - you will not get that on Windows at all. It does all your favorite PACS workstation does in your hospital's MRI (including 3D/4D/5D etc). You can load MRI scans on your iPod. And it is free. Check at http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/ . For fun I use it too with GraphicConverter for photos, iMovie and FinalCut Pro for movies, iTunes for music and training files, Amadeus II to edit sound files, …

The only times I do need Windows are the training CD's that sometimes were not made for Mac OS X. But Parallels Workstation takes care of those - or BootCamp, but usually it is much easier to have Windows running under OS X, and performance is very good (say at least 80% of native speed unless you need high performance graphics - then Boot Camp is the way to go, and your Mac Book Pro will be as fast as any of the best other Windows laptops.)

Bottom line: Get a Mac, and buy it as late as possible (cheaper). Enjoy!

HTH

Marc

I can not tell you much about the MacBook (I do not own one), but I'm sure I can tell you about the relation between Medical Career and Mac. You'll love your Mac, there will be nothing you can't do on it. And you won't have to worry about viruses, spyware, malware, etcétera... they just simply DO NOT exist for the mac. Please note I'm not saying they will never exist, it's just that there are actually NO VIRUSES on the wild for Mac.

I went into a rather lengthy explanation before for a similar question. Check This post for more infor. Hope this helps.

Switch. It won't hurt you at all, and I promise you will never feel to change back to windows. I am so glad I lost this reboot, formatting, crashing, dataloss kinda thing behind me.