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I am starting my first year in college as a Comp Science major and am thinking of purchasing a new Mac. I've made up my mind to buy the 13" Macbook Air with 4GB RAM, 1.7 GHz I5 processor, and 256GB hard drive, and purchase a Mac Mini later on in my years at college. (If using the Mac Air is ill advised, please let me know your opinion, as I'm clearly a newb in the computer game. Though I do enjoy the portability, I don't want to sacrifice power to the point where I can't get any programming done on the thing or it will be too hectic for me to do so). I am considering purchasing Parallels for Mac in order to run other operating systems such as Linux or Windows from my external hard drive for testing and such. Does this make the computer any slower? What about if I partition the hard drive to run both OSX and Windows as opposed to installing Windows on an external HD? All-in-All I would like the OSX to be my main OS
Any information is greatly appreciated and I look forward to spending a lot of time here :)
Thank you
I think that memory is your main concern with the MBA. In general, coding should not take much resources. Testing is another story and you'll probably want to reboot into Windows for optimal testing performance anyway. Parallels is a great asset for getting something done quickly and then getting back to OS X. – jsejcksn – 2011-09-12T03:39:00.600
1If you're doing Comp Sci, you'll thank yourself later for getting a PC. All of your programming classes will most likely assume either visual studio on Windows or native linux environment, and your plan to install them to an external drive will not work well. – Joel Coehoorn – 2011-09-12T04:08:07.860
Computer science and a Mac? I agree with @JoelCoehoom. Microsoft has their fingers everywhere in computer science classes. A mac is just not a programmer's tool. A web designer's or film/audio maker's, sure. But not a programmer's. – sinni800 – 2011-09-12T06:14:16.523
As an addendum - Macs can be just fine for programming, even Windows development via bootcamp, parallels, etc. But as a student, you'll really thank yourself for starting out with a PC. – Joel Coehoorn – 2011-09-14T13:32:38.977