Ti PB for a CS student?

[r4bid]

Ok I hope this is the right forum, I dont' think this is really a hardware question...

I am a windows user entering my senior year of high school right now and college is on my mind a lot. I have a friend who has a ti powerbook and I love how it looks and I love osx. I am just wondering if a powerbook would be right for a CS student (computer science)? I know that a lot of my work will probably be done in *nix or windows environments so would osx be compatible or have comparable tools?
If any of you are CS majors or think you know something about programming tools available for osx I would love your advice on what computer to get. I am aiming for a laptop and a desktop, desktop will almost certainly be windows(my current one if it doesn't break in the next year) while the laptop could be either windows or mac depending on practicality.

If I do go with a powerbook I will probably wait till next summer and get it from my schools store to get a big discout and the next generation model.

[reichmac]

Well I know more about Computer Engineering, but CS should be the same.

I'd say you can drop PCs altogether if you buy the new apple models for your laptop and desktop--an 800 Mhz PowerBook and at least the new 1 Ghz Dual.

All you do is buy Virtual PC, and you can have any flavor of Windows or linux on your Mac to work with. OS X, of course, has comparable tools for development, but they are free and are standards based. Check out Apple Developer Connection for the details.

[reichmac]

oh, but don't count on anything more than a couple hundred of dollars off your Apple Educational purchases even if you wait a while.

[r4bid]

Thanks for the info reichmac.
Yeah, I know about the size of the discounts but I want the top of the line model when I enter college(a year from now). I am guessing that at least 2 revisions to the pb will happen in that time.

Any more input would be extreamly appreciated.

[davidbrit2]

Pretty much any OS X compatible laptop is extremely well suited for a CS major. It's basically just a matter of choosing what fits your preferences in terms of budget, capabilities, and form factor. CS work is extremely easy with the UNIX operating system, thanks to the lovely Project Builder. It works great for C and Java.

Personally, I went with the 12.1" iBook, mostly because of its extremely small size. I used mine all last year, and it was absolute bliss. In fact, I used it so much, that I had to order a second battery! It should be here in a few days, and I'll be staring at my LCD during class once again.

[RHITMacMan]

I am also a Computer Engineering student, and CS is close but not the same by far to Computer Engineering. With CS, you almost exclusively deal with programming and writing software. In computer engineering, you learn to program as well as design electronic circuits / computer hardware.

If I were you, I would go with a PowerBook. It will help you learn a lot about Unix environments if you delve into the core of OS X. I think being a good CS or CO student requires one to learn as much as possible about the three most popular operating system environments. Those would be the MacOS, *nix OSes, and the Windows OS. So I would suggest you keep your Windows desktop, cause I guarantee it will come in handy a lot in college from my experience. Virtual PC is great, but it can be slow and doesn't give you the full effect of a native Wintel machine (this can be counter-productive.) You could probably update it really cheaply too, probably less that $500. Otherwise, build your own system from scratch and pop Windows on one partition and Linux on the other.

I can almost guarantee you that you will have at least one, if not many, professors in college that will require you to use Windows for your course work. If you don't have a Windows computer at your disposal, you will need to go wait in line at a public lab, which is not fun at all. I know as CO, you need to have a Windows computer to run course specific software that just doesn't run on the Mac. This software is either bulky and slow in Virtual PC since it is used for circuit design, or it requires you hook up various hardware components to your serial port for testing or updating firmware type boards with your code. Guess what, the software only runs on Windows and your Mac has no 25-pin serial ports. I believe the CSes at my school also take these hardware programming classes as well.

So don't discount Windows before you reach college, you can make that choice if you like after college.

[jarinteractive]

I am a CS major and I love my powerbook! As stated above, the UNIX base is great, as is the free developer tools that can edit/compile C++ and Java. It is also great to be able to run a webserver to create and test PHP/MySQL based websites (I do this as a job while in school).

-JARinteractive

[r4bid]

Is there any way to do visual c++ stuff on a mac? I have no idea what exact classes I will be taking so I don't know if visualy c++ would ever be a possible requirement...

Also, are there any c# programming tools on the mac? I really don't want to ever use c#, I like java a lot better but you never know how programming courses could change over the next four years. I assume the answer is no as it is a child of microsoft and it probably wont release a vm for the mac.