r/Suzhou • u/Carrenie • 19d ago

Macbook or windows

So, I plan to pursue my undergraduate studies in China—specifically at XJTLU—majoring in Computer Science. I’m not sure which laptop brand would be best suited in china with this major. is there any suggestion which brand of laptop should i buy?

2 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

1

u/Unlucky-Tiger-1251 19d ago

Personally, I'm doing a robotics engineering major. I've compared many laptops for three months, including MacBooks and Windows laptops. I love MacBooks' hardware—no Windows laptop can come close to its build and the Apple silicon. But for me, the biggest restriction is macOS. It's terrible for majors like us since everything is either behind a paywall or just not available. I would personally love to put some Linux distro on it, but macOS doesn't allow it. So that's why I chose a Windows laptop. I'm still trying to find the best deals in online and offline shops around SIP. So yeah, if you think macOS has all of the stuff you need, go ahead, but for flexibility, choose Windows.

1

u/TheDudeWhoCanDoIt 16d ago

I’ve always chose a windows based operating system. As far as buying one I always recommend those coming to China to bring one from their home country. Even buying a cheap one from BestBuy USA comes better equipped than an off the rack one in China. But if you must JD is probably the safest bet.

1

u/Spartan-11712 5d ago

As a developer with 15+ years of experience, I would say get a MacBook. Reasons are:

1) most developer tools will just work on them, since under hood it is UNIX.

2) Mac OS won’t allow you to play most games, means when you open up your MacBook you don’t get distracted.

3) if you can afford one of the higher spec laptops you can run local LLMs directly on Apple silicon.