Haswell MacBook Pro or Ivy Bridge MacBook Pro or Haswell MacBook Air for a Undergraduate Mechanical Engineering Student?

Since your selections mention a possible future unreleased product, we cannot discuss it according to the terms of this forum. 😟

Please redirect your question at another fourm like AppleInsider or MacRumors where such discussion is permiitted and encouraged.

Thank you. 🙂

Save the money you would spend on the Retina. The Haswell Air should be more than sufficient for your needs. Get the 13-inch and max the RAM on it.

If you were a professional video editor I would have said wait for the Haswell Retina, but I can't envision anything you would need to do that you couldn't do very well with the Air.

Some people just don't know what retina means, I'm never going back to normal screens, it's a pity for people who don't know what it's like.

So you think a college student should spend twice as much on a computer that they're only going to use to do homework and look at pictures on? They expressed a concern for battery life, the Air seems like a much more appropriate choice for the uses they described.

I'm a college student and I'm getting the 13inch haswell retina pro this september/october, forgive the views of the computer engineering major...

I was just a freshmen this year as a Mechanical Engineer. I used my "older" (first line of core i5 around 2010) laptop this whole year with the intention of purchasing a new computer after I saved money and figured out what I would want and here is what I found was best for me.

Large screens. If you can get ebooks or online books to reduce the wait of your backpack I would recommend getting a 15" screen. Engineering classes are a little different than liberal arts classes because you still really need a pencil and paper out at every class so I found that I never needed to have my computer out during class. Keep in mind however I did have my iphone out always, and in January I got myself an iPad mini which I 200% recommend for college. but thats aside the point. I found myself working in the library most often where I didnt move for hours and having the bigger screen is a huge advantage over a smaller one.

Secondly, what I find most important about a computer at eng school is performance. The faster you can open up your homework or an application you need the less of a chance you will get distracted by facebook or other websites that load very quickly. That being said I would still recommend the 15" MBP because it has the best specs for the price at $1699 after edu discounts. Also when you get into your later engineering courses you will need to have a fast computer to run applications like MATLAB or MAPLE or really any resource demanding application. And if you decide you want to run those faster than your MBP can do, you can easily upgrade your Hard drive, RAM capacity, or even add a Solid State Drive to really pick up the performance later in the macs life.

So get a MBP 15" non retina when it is released in October, or get the 15" model now. Both will be your best bet.

Please don't get a macbook air as an engineering student. You will find it so much more useful to be able to install all the software your course provides you and run it on your own machine, rather than fighting for space in the computer labs the night before your project is due.

TL;DR use your crappy PC for a little bit longer because it will do just fine for a few months, but save up for the next line of 15" MBPs to be released.