Mac vs PC in medical school

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A comparable high end Dell Latitude laptop with similar specs are actually more expensive than Macbrook Pros, from what I've gathered by looking online.

I've not had the bad experience with Dell that everyone else has... I bought a Dell 14" Inspiron completely customized back in 2009. It was about $1100 then and it had some of the best specs at the time. I still have it now and haven't had to replace anything at all and it still runs just fine.

I am still trying to decide between a Dell Latitude and MBP, but MBP seems to be loved by more people and is actually cheaper, and has the retina display...
 
Judson said:
http://www.cnet.com/news/macbook-pro-declared-best-performing-windows-laptop/

Old but interesting article. In the pc's defense, the price points on a pc are stellar compared to macs.

OP - Realistically, only a small percentage of premed/med will need anything more than a machine that can check email, write documents and presentations, and maybe perform intense statistical analyses or render big images (if you're involved in research). The differences between a pc or mac for our purposes are trivial.
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Yep -- important point. My new i7 Haswell PC was under $600. My last MBP (when Core2 Duo was da bomb) was $2000.
 
Member 0922 said:
I am still trying to decide between a Dell Latitude and MBP, but MBP seems to be loved by more people and is actually cheaper, and has the retina display...
Click to expand...

If you're anything like me, you will not be disappointed by the retina display. Pics/movies are awesome with it.
 
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darkjedi said:
Thinkpads used to be amazing laptops, but their quality really deteriorated after IBM sold them off to lenovo.
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i can agree with that sentiment. the trackpoint feature though.. its unparalleled. i think some of the older latitude did, but not sure if they do now.
 
Do you think that you could hold out with your current laptop until you know where you are going for school?

Some schools will give you an iPad (or rather make you pay more in tuition so they can buy an iPad for you😉). A few may give you a laptop. Others may not require a laptop or may have a specific recommendation on PC vs Mac.

Here, we are all supposed to have laptops (in theory), and when people bring their computers, there are definitely more Macs than PCs. However, I would say that most of the time I see more iPads than anything else.

Once you know where you are going, you can find out what the situation is at your school and make decisions from there. You may decide just to get an iPad and maybe a new desktop or something. Or you might not even want a computer. Who knows!
 
skiier54 said:
I think Macs scored higher because the windows installations on it are clean, meaning there is none of the pre-installed junk that most PCs come with. Some PCs are unnecessarily expensive though, particularly Dells.
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Yea, they mentioned that in the article. No doubt pcs come with a lot of junk, but if you know how to remove it you're golden. Never had a Dell, only HPs. My last one cost me ~$700 and lasted almost 4 years.
 
I'm still on my early 2011 13.3 MacBook Pro. Aside from a small reduction in battery life over the past 3.5 years, it still runs great. Actually, it runs better than the day I got it because I put an Intel SSD in it last year. It's hard to beat a 5 second boot. Soon I'm installing some Crucial RAM for 8 gb.

On the support communities for apple products, many claim that people are still going strong with their PowerBooks and early gen iMacs after a decade. The awesome support community is another big benefit of using a Mac.

EDIT: I'll add the the track pad on the macbook line is great. I much prefer it to any mouse.
 
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J Senpai said:
I'm still on my early 2011 13.3 MacBook Pro. Aside from a small reduction in battery life over the past 3.5 years, it still runs great. Actually, it runs better than the day I got it because I put an Intel SSD in it last year. It's hard to beat a 5 second boot. Soon I'm installing some Crucial RAM for 8 gb.

On the support communities for apple products, many claim that people are still going strong with their PowerBooks and early gen iMacs after a decade. The awesome support community is another big benefit of using a Mac.
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My fiancée's parents' 2003 Apple G5 is still going strong. They've upgraded components a few times over the years, though well under $1000 total, and it runs just like a brand new iMac.
 
WillburCobb said:
You can get OneNote for Apple products, though I've heard mixed reviews (and the issues generally tend to fall in Microsoft's hands to boot). Search the allo forum, there have been a few threads on this topic in the past several months. Notability is one app that comes to mind.
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Except you can't import PDFs, powerpoints, or Word documents. I was a huge fan of OneNote in undergrad but am really disappointed with the Mac release. Why Microsoft hasn't addressed those features - or didn't included them in the first place - is beyond me.
 
Amba said:
Except you can't import PDFs, powerpoints, or Word documents. I was a huge fan of OneNote in undergrad but am really disappointed with the Mac release. Why Microsoft hasn't addressed those features - or didn't included them in the first place - is beyond me.
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Because it's Microsoft...
 
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Anecdotally I have had a Mackbook Pro for 5 years with absolutely no issues, before that I would need to switch out a laptop about every 2 years after a slow death (alternating between HP and Dell).
There's always the argument about specs and price and blah blah blah. If you're going to be using it for schoolwork and internet browsing, specs don't make a huge difference. After that it comes down to reliability, battery life (it's nice to know you don't need your cord for class), usability and price.
I prefer OSX versus Windows (ESPECIALLY Windows 8), it feels more intuitive and looks sharper. I also really love the aesthetic of the mac, there's really no pc that has the clean and smooth look of the macbook pro. If stuff like that doesn't matter to you then go with the PC. If price is a concern you can get a PC for cheaper.
 
If all you're going to do is browse the web or write notes, there really is no difference. Just go with the operating system that you like.
 
Windows 8 gets actually very convenient (unlike Android phones) after you use it for a couple months.
 
I'm a big advocate of switching back and forth between both OSs depending on my needs. For general purpose, I use windows pretty exclusively. For creative endeavors (music, photography, movies, etc) I use apple's OS X exclusively.

If you buy a laptop with reasonable specs and a good size hard drive, it's very easy to have both OSs installed and to switch between them.

If you buy a mac, partitioning your hard drive and installing windows is a breeze thanks to boot camp.

If you buy a windows based computer, partitioning the hard drive and installing OS X is much trickier and can require a great deal of tweaking and fiddling, but it's still not terribly difficult.

I've done both on different machines with great results every time, and it allows me to switch very easily if I ever run into compatibility issues (which, admittedly, are increasingly rare these days) or when I feel like an application on one OS or the other is better suited for what I'm trying to do.
 
Have you ever considered a surface pro?
If you prefer handwritten notes over typing, they are absolutely phenomenal. For example, these are a few pages from my MCAT notes http://imgur.com/a/qHjRL
I can give a link to my notebook if anyone is interested, but the online version of onenote messes up the formatting.
 
i will probably just stick with PC because it is all i know. i will (hopefully) be starting med school in a year, so i will wait until right before starting (maybe a month to get used to the new computer and get all my settings figured out/set) and get something that has at least 8GB of RAM and prob a quadcore i7. storage isn't ever a real big issue with me, but at least a 250GB HDD
 
Mad Jack said:
I don't get why people still buy Dell and HP, their machines are garbage. HP had been awful since the merger with Compaq, and Dell has sucked since at least 2003.
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what would you suggest for:
1) minimum hardware reqs for a med student
2) preferred
3) maybe a little excessive, but still in the realm of useful
 
Heday said:
thinkpads. that is all. after 5 years of using the trackpoint, all laptops are inferior.
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Truth. Thinkpad Trackpoints are the best laptop input device, period.

Macbooks are priced competitively with similar-spec PCs (spec includes form factor and build quality). The difference is that Apple doesn't have any market presence in the midrange and low end.

For laptops, if you're looking for something cheap, anything with a normal CPU (not Atom or E-series) that feels solid and has a keyboard you like will really be fine. You want to pay extra for build quality, form factor (size, weight), battery life, screen quality, and input device quality.
 
baxt1412 said:
what would you suggest for:
1) minimum hardware reqs for a med student
2) preferred
3) maybe a little excessive, but still in the realm of useful
Click to expand...
This is totally school dependent. Anything with an i5 processor and 8 gigs of ram will do just fine at most places. Midrange, you're looking at 12 gigs of RAM and an i7 in a PC, possibly with a Geforce 840M graphics card, SSD, or both. At the higher end of the midrange, you've got the better i7s, 16 gifg of RAM, Geforce 860ms, larger SSDs or SSD+HDD combos, that sort of thing.
 
Mad Jack said:
This is totally school dependent. Anything with an i5 processor and 8 gigs of ram will do just fine at most places. Midrange, you're looking at 12 gigs of RAM and an i7 in a PC, possibly with a Geforce 840M graphics card, SSD, or both. At the higher end of the midrange, you've got the better i7s, 16 gifg of RAM, Geforce 860ms, larger SSDs or SSD+HDD combos, that sort of thing.
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i5 and 12 GB RAM is totally overkill, as is a discrete graphics card.

SSD is IMO mandatory for any PC these days. Fortunately, swapping an SSD into a laptop is generally pretty easy.
 
I don't necessarily think an i5 is overkill, but 12GB of RAM for school stuff would be overkill in my opinion. we aren't doing video editing.

now if you are going to be using your computer for stuff other than school/general internet browsing.. then your specs would probably change.
 
i5 as a minimum requirement is definitely overkill. With an SSD and 8 GB of RAM, it would be rather tough to tell the difference between a Haswell Pentium and i5 for the vast majority of tasks.
 
el_duderino said:
i5 and 12 GB RAM is totally overkill, as is a discrete graphics card.

SSD is IMO mandatory for any PC these days. Fortunately, swapping an SSD into a laptop is generally pretty easy.
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I just mean from a price to lifespan of the product perspective. I've got an i3 machine that's lasted me four years, but the last two of them really hurt much more than they had to. Plus windows 9 is coming out sometime next year, so I'd rather have more room for error so far as the CPU and RAM go.
 
One of the schools I applied to requires a school-issued iPad, included in the tuition cost.

I bought a refurbished 2007 Lenovo Thinkpad about 6 months ago for $200 and it works as well as my other newer Apple devices.
 
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Mad Jack said:
I just mean from a price to lifespan of the product perspective. I've got an i3 machine that's lasted me four years, but the last two of them really hurt much more than they had to. Plus windows 9 is coming out sometime next year, so I'd rather have more room for error so far as the CPU and RAM go.
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An i5 from the same family as your old i3 would not have been much better.

Does that old laptop have an SSD?
 
what kind of improvement do you see in a SSD? faster access? to what exactly? opening files? programs? startup?
 
Anything regarding file access. Startup, program opening, moving/copying files, cached web resources (sites load faster because images and css and so forth load faster from the cache), etc. Everything is much snappier with an SSD vs HDD. It's so dramatic it's stupid.
 
Here's a photo of orientation at the U of MN - Twin Cities campus. Looks like everyone has macs... Except for that one guy near the back right, but it looks like he's trying to blend in with the other macs by using a PC with a silver back (if only he had an apple sticker)
U of MN Orientation.jpg
 
GoBadgers! said:
Here's a photo of orientation at the U of MN - Twin Cities campus. Looks like everyone has macs... Except for that one guy near the back right, but it looks like he's trying to blend in with the other macs by using a PC with a silver back (if only he had an apple sticker)
View attachment 184066
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The heavy use of macs by people in medical school is probably just as much of a function of the fact that macs are an identity brand and those from upper middle class backgrounds are disproportionately represented in medical school than it is about the actual utility of macs themselves.

Just so I can be objective about my mac hate (I haven't had one since 2008) I'll buy one and try it out this semester. Won't be gaming much anyway, so why not. If I get sick of it I can always throw win7 on the damn thing.
 
To give you an idea of what a high end PC laptop is like, here ya go:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=34-725-001

3 128 GB SSDs raided together as primary storage, dual geforce 860Ms in SLI, 16 gigs of RAM, a top end i7, 1 TB of HDD space, etc. All for about the cost of a 15" MB pro. Keep in mind this is a power computing setup that isn't designed for portability. Something high end and portable would be the Zenbook, which has a damn nice screen and solid specs packed into a tiny 14" package.
 
Mad Jack said:
Macs are for people that can't handle actual computers. They're overpriced for the specs by double what a comparable win 7 rig would run you much of the time. Then again, 9/10 people don't know what to look for in a windows machine so they buy garbage.

For those that aren't technically minded, Macs are often a better choice most of the time. Not because they're better machines, but because they've been designed from the ground up to baby their users.
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Amazing post. You are a god among mere mortals.
 
Mad Jack said:
Considering you can get those specs for around 900-1000 bucks, I'd call it midrange. The RAM isn't super important since you can always upgrade, so really 8 gb is fine.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152569

That one has everything but a SSD for 1000 without even being on sale.
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It's also 6 lbs, 1.5" thick, and lasts a grand total of 3 hours with casual internet surfing.

I'm sure it's a fine machine for gaming and desktop use, but IMO this is far from an ideal machine for school use. It's heavy, bulky, and has poor battery life.
 
Mad Jack said:
Considering you can get those specs for around 900-1000 bucks, I'd call it midrange. The RAM isn't super important since you can always upgrade, so really 8 gb is fine.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152569

That one has everything but a SSD for 1000 without even being on sale.
Click to expand...

You know what, you're right. I think for a typical consumer though, midrange is likely to be i3-i5 processor with 4-8gb ram. While this may seem be entry-level specs for a power user, I was keeping in mind the general med school population. I think for a med student: i5, 8gb, and SSD would be more than sufficient.
 
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baxt1412 said:
what kind of improvement do you see in a SSD? faster access? to what exactly? opening files? programs? startup?
Click to expand...
Faster access to all files, including start up and applications. Reading and writing files is greatly improved. Startup is like 5 seconds. I recommend an SSD. I wouldn't want to go without it.
 
Didn't know macs were so popular until I got to college. Have always been a windows guy. Ultimately for every day use I don't see much of a difference between the two, unless there is software that MUST run that isn't compatible with macs.
 
Lamel said:
Didn't know macs were so popular until I got to college. Have always been a windows guy. Ultimately for every day use I don't see much of a difference between the two, unless there is software that MUST run that isn't compatible with macs.
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I just am not used to using a mac so there is that learning curve (albeit it's not that big of a curve for basic computing)
 
Lamel said:
Didn't know macs were so popular until I got to college. Have always been a windows guy. Ultimately for every day use I don't see much of a difference between the two, unless there is software that MUST run that isn't compatible with macs.
Click to expand...
Med and college students are a self selecting bunch. Less than one in six new laptops sold is a Macbook.
pc-vendor-share-Gartner2-20131009.png
 
Mad Jack said:
Med and college students are a self selecting bunch. Less than one in six new laptops sold is a Macbook.
pc-vendor-share-Gartner2-20131009.png
Click to expand...

If there were a way to adjust or limit this graph to laptops above a certain price point, it would be dominated by Apple. HP and Dell dominate this now because they dominate the low-end market, which Apple does not even serve.

When you start looking at laptops that are thin and light with good specs and long battery life, those low-end HP/Dell/Toshiba/Asus/MSI/Ideapad sort of disappear. Those companies make some quality higher-end machines too, but sell relatively few of them compared to Apple.

For example, the Macbook Air has 56% of the thin-and-light laptop market by itself.
 
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