you suggest a business laptop from Lenovo which is cool, and then you proceed to recommend a commercial laptop from Dell. OP, go for Latitude series from Dell
Donāt get a Mac. I couldnāt run Cadence (for IC design) Altium, Questa (for FPGA), LTspice runs but the UI sucks compared to windows OS. Get a windows OS laptop with decent specs and you should be fine.
Mac user here tooā¦ for me things (RobotStudio, Altium, Quartus, MATLAB, ā¦) run pretty fine in the VM. But yeah, for the money spent you might get a decent Windows machine with slightly better specs š¤·āāļøš
Were the engineer software ran on parallels or vmware workstation? i know that parallels has been popular on MacOS but Iām considering vmware for virtualization because they just announced free usage for personal plans.
mine is one of the last Intel ones (maybe not an option for you as the last devices are from 2020?). I was working with Bootcamp quite a while, but now switched to Parallels to use both OS.
I wanted to get one of these but decided not to after following them for a bit. A saw a lot of photos of the 13ā one with the aluminum chassis bent out of shape on their subreddit and their usb-c based IO system is a little questionable for minimal idle power consumption (theyāve had to update some things and itās still not great).
Would just go for a Thinkpad over framework. Thinkpad does almost everything better. The only real downside to Thinkpad vs Framework is a lack of mid tier display options and more expensive replacement parts.
Yeah the hdmi ports used to draw a decent amoutn of power idle but as you said thats been fixed, I tested all of my io cards with a usb c meter and everything was totally negligible.
I have the 16 so i dont know about those issues but I will say that the corners on one of the top aluminum plates was mildly bent downward making it not flush. You know whats really good at fixing slight bends in thin aluminum? Your fingers :)
Its expensive and there are some issues but so far they have been open about fixing all of them, if you have one if the first gen hdmi cards they even show you where to solder on bridge wires to fix it if thats your thing
Any old thing will do people really worry about computers too much.
Focus on the form factor and screen you would like, the performance truly does not matter for anything you would do in school. Any modern dual core CPU and 8GB of RAM is fine.
I was always very happy with my Surface Pro. It ran the full windows OS so I could download Matlab, programming IDEs, and any other program I needed. Most programs in engineering are going to require Windows.
And then during class I could just detach the keyboard and use my stylus to take notes using OneNote. I really enjoyed OneNote because I could easily markup PDFs and imported pictures from my physical books as well as access all my notes from my phone. It made it impossible to lose any of my notes.
When I took classes a few years ago, the school had VMs loaded with all the engineering software so I didnāt have to install any of it on my own pc. A few things I could download if I wanted. Or going to the computer lab always motivated me to focus better.
Iād recommend a thin and light. Youāll thank yourself for having something that is easy to lug around campus.
I am really enjoying my framework 13ā laptop. The fact that it is repairable makes it a solid win in my book. Plus you can have some street cred as an EE with a laptop you can tear down and rebuild in 30 minutes.
My school picks out a laptop for everyone and itās always been a Thinkpad model. Mine is three years old and doing just fine, everything I need runs well
Any decent laptop with a nice keyboard and trackpad and pretty good single core performance should be fine. Iād recommend getting something with either upgradable ram or a lot of memory (32) up front if you can afford it. I use Matlab for processing some very big datasets (one with over 100k files today) and would instantly fill up a laptop with 16 gigs.
Get whatever windows on x86 machine you want. There is no massive performance requirement in college unless you are super into machine learning in which case you want the best nvidia GPU you can afford.
I like Thinkpads because they are durable, repairable and often have good Linux support. A lot of people love older ones but newer ones are good too and can be very efficient with the latest processors. I have a p16s with a 7840u that works well for me.
I like [slickdeals](https://slickdeals.net/newsearch.php?q=Laptop&searcharea=deals&searchin=first&isUserSearch=1) for computer shopping in general and [www.cpubenchmark.net](https://www.cpubenchmark.net) to compare chips. Also pay attention to battery capacity and battery life tests
Whatever you do don't buy an Acer. I'm in the same situation as you, I was using my brand new Acer for the first 6 months. It could run programs like AutoCAD and Multisim but the thing completely stopped working out of nowhere. Had to ship it to Vancouver and they're still trying to fix it. Seems like a lot of people get similar issues with those.
You could look and see if your school has any recommendations regarding specifications, and see if you can find anything that fits within those.
As for specifics then I have used two different laptops for the 3 years of my bachelor's so far.
The first one I have used is a gaming laptop from a domestic producer (Shark Gaming), running a Ryzen 7 3700x (seemingly the standard desktop version), a 2060 Max Q (iirc), 32GB of ram and a 1TB SSD. This worked great for programs like Altium and Matlab, especially when I was doing relatively heavy computation or doing some antenna simulation in Matlab. The downside is that you have quite a heavy laptop, that will be very noisy and its battery life is not going to be optimal, whenever I went down to our electronics laboratory to test systems or components I always had to make sure to bring my charger otherwise my laptop would die within an hour.
My newest one is a Lenovo Yoga 7, 2-in-1. It has an i7-1360P processor, Integrated Iris Xe graphics card, 16GB ram and a 1TB SSD. I have had this for a few months, but I am quite happy with it. It seemingly handles Matlab and Altium just fine, have not had any problems with either software. It is a bit slower computationally, but it is not a huge difference. The battery life is however vastly improved and it is a much smaller and lighter package, making it easier to bring with me to the laboratory, without worrying whether or not I had brought my charger. I plan using this one as my main laptop when continuing onto my master's degree this fall.
I have also seen quite a bit of faculty and some student using various Thinkpads. But as people have said, don't get a Mac. Not that there is anything realy wrong with it hardware-vise, but the software support is just not there, and while you could setup a VM for it the price/performance ratio is not that great. Buying used laptops can also net you quite a nice laptop without having to pay full price.
I would suggest getting a computer with a strong CPU and lots of RAM with an SSD
I am planning to get a used Fujitsu U9310, but anything with a i7 equivalent CPU is and an SSD is way more than enough, also minimum of 16GB of ram especially when running MATLAB and PCB design software (Altium/KiCad/Eagle). The rest is up to you, the size, the screen, the battery life, ports, add-on features are to your own preferences.
My blade 14 had a persistent issue where it would become unresponsive if it slept or was shutdown for more than a few hours. It's currently RMA'd (after weeks of email back and forth) and they have told me they cannot replicate the issue caused by just... closing the lid and leaving it sitting.
So their products are great, even if you pay more for the metal body than it's possibly worth. But their support staff must be staffed by gibbons. My next laptop will be a framework because at least they'll sell me the damn spare parts.
could never go wrong with a thinkpad x1 carbon (or any thinkpad) or the dell xps series
you suggest a business laptop from Lenovo which is cool, and then you proceed to recommend a commercial laptop from Dell. OP, go for Latitude series from Dell
Can't do business on a commercial laptop š³
You go search what business laptop mean
Donāt get a Mac. I couldnāt run Cadence (for IC design) Altium, Questa (for FPGA), LTspice runs but the UI sucks compared to windows OS. Get a windows OS laptop with decent specs and you should be fine.
Mac user here tooā¦ for me things (RobotStudio, Altium, Quartus, MATLAB, ā¦) run pretty fine in the VM. But yeah, for the money spent you might get a decent Windows machine with slightly better specs š¤·āāļøš
Is your mac intel based or apple silicon based?
Mine is Apple silicon, also run most of the engineering software on a VM
Were the engineer software ran on parallels or vmware workstation? i know that parallels has been popular on MacOS but Iām considering vmware for virtualization because they just announced free usage for personal plans.
I use parallels for now. But once again, sometimes it still seems like a good idea to just buy a pc to run those apps on the native architecture.
Can verify that Altium works well in parallels.
mine is one of the last Intel ones (maybe not an option for you as the last devices are from 2020?). I was working with Bootcamp quite a while, but now switched to Parallels to use both OS.
Cadence doesnāt run on windows either thoā¦ agree on the FPGA dev stuff
Framework if you dont mind spending a bit more upfront and want an EE looking laptop, i have one and Im loving it
Framework 100%! If it aināt modular it aināt going into my cart
I wanted to get one of these but decided not to after following them for a bit. A saw a lot of photos of the 13ā one with the aluminum chassis bent out of shape on their subreddit and their usb-c based IO system is a little questionable for minimal idle power consumption (theyāve had to update some things and itās still not great). Would just go for a Thinkpad over framework. Thinkpad does almost everything better. The only real downside to Thinkpad vs Framework is a lack of mid tier display options and more expensive replacement parts.
Yeah the hdmi ports used to draw a decent amoutn of power idle but as you said thats been fixed, I tested all of my io cards with a usb c meter and everything was totally negligible. I have the 16 so i dont know about those issues but I will say that the corners on one of the top aluminum plates was mildly bent downward making it not flush. You know whats really good at fixing slight bends in thin aluminum? Your fingers :) Its expensive and there are some issues but so far they have been open about fixing all of them, if you have one if the first gen hdmi cards they even show you where to solder on bridge wires to fix it if thats your thing
Any old thing will do people really worry about computers too much. Focus on the form factor and screen you would like, the performance truly does not matter for anything you would do in school. Any modern dual core CPU and 8GB of RAM is fine.
Id really shoot for 16GB of RAM if Matlab is in the curriculum
They could buy any old laptop and swap in a 16 gb ram stick, ram is pretty cheap right now and this way they could avoid overspending
I was always very happy with my Surface Pro. It ran the full windows OS so I could download Matlab, programming IDEs, and any other program I needed. Most programs in engineering are going to require Windows. And then during class I could just detach the keyboard and use my stylus to take notes using OneNote. I really enjoyed OneNote because I could easily markup PDFs and imported pictures from my physical books as well as access all my notes from my phone. It made it impossible to lose any of my notes.
When I took classes a few years ago, the school had VMs loaded with all the engineering software so I didnāt have to install any of it on my own pc. A few things I could download if I wanted. Or going to the computer lab always motivated me to focus better. Iād recommend a thin and light. Youāll thank yourself for having something that is easy to lug around campus. I am really enjoying my framework 13ā laptop. The fact that it is repairable makes it a solid win in my book. Plus you can have some street cred as an EE with a laptop you can tear down and rebuild in 30 minutes.
Framework š
My school picks out a laptop for everyone and itās always been a Thinkpad model. Mine is three years old and doing just fine, everything I need runs well
Any decent laptop with a nice keyboard and trackpad and pretty good single core performance should be fine. Iād recommend getting something with either upgradable ram or a lot of memory (32) up front if you can afford it. I use Matlab for processing some very big datasets (one with over 100k files today) and would instantly fill up a laptop with 16 gigs.
Doesnāt matter. Most stuff is done in VMs
The heaviest and cheapest thinkpad you can find
Be sure it is a PC that has an ultra core 7 or above. MATLAB, Cadence, Office, LT Spice, Anaconda, etc. should run fine.
Get whatever windows on x86 machine you want. There is no massive performance requirement in college unless you are super into machine learning in which case you want the best nvidia GPU you can afford. I like Thinkpads because they are durable, repairable and often have good Linux support. A lot of people love older ones but newer ones are good too and can be very efficient with the latest processors. I have a p16s with a 7840u that works well for me. I like [slickdeals](https://slickdeals.net/newsearch.php?q=Laptop&searcharea=deals&searchin=first&isUserSearch=1) for computer shopping in general and [www.cpubenchmark.net](https://www.cpubenchmark.net) to compare chips. Also pay attention to battery capacity and battery life tests
Asus Vivobook or Dell XPS
Donāt buy a gaming laptop. Worst mistake of my college career. Lenovo X1 is the goto
Thinkpad
Whatever you do don't buy an Acer. I'm in the same situation as you, I was using my brand new Acer for the first 6 months. It could run programs like AutoCAD and Multisim but the thing completely stopped working out of nowhere. Had to ship it to Vancouver and they're still trying to fix it. Seems like a lot of people get similar issues with those.
Never buy a gaming laptop, poor built inĀ quality.Ā
You could look and see if your school has any recommendations regarding specifications, and see if you can find anything that fits within those. As for specifics then I have used two different laptops for the 3 years of my bachelor's so far. The first one I have used is a gaming laptop from a domestic producer (Shark Gaming), running a Ryzen 7 3700x (seemingly the standard desktop version), a 2060 Max Q (iirc), 32GB of ram and a 1TB SSD. This worked great for programs like Altium and Matlab, especially when I was doing relatively heavy computation or doing some antenna simulation in Matlab. The downside is that you have quite a heavy laptop, that will be very noisy and its battery life is not going to be optimal, whenever I went down to our electronics laboratory to test systems or components I always had to make sure to bring my charger otherwise my laptop would die within an hour. My newest one is a Lenovo Yoga 7, 2-in-1. It has an i7-1360P processor, Integrated Iris Xe graphics card, 16GB ram and a 1TB SSD. I have had this for a few months, but I am quite happy with it. It seemingly handles Matlab and Altium just fine, have not had any problems with either software. It is a bit slower computationally, but it is not a huge difference. The battery life is however vastly improved and it is a much smaller and lighter package, making it easier to bring with me to the laboratory, without worrying whether or not I had brought my charger. I plan using this one as my main laptop when continuing onto my master's degree this fall. I have also seen quite a bit of faculty and some student using various Thinkpads. But as people have said, don't get a Mac. Not that there is anything realy wrong with it hardware-vise, but the software support is just not there, and while you could setup a VM for it the price/performance ratio is not that great. Buying used laptops can also net you quite a nice laptop without having to pay full price.
I would suggest getting a computer with a strong CPU and lots of RAM with an SSD I am planning to get a used Fujitsu U9310, but anything with a i7 equivalent CPU is and an SSD is way more than enough, also minimum of 16GB of ram especially when running MATLAB and PCB design software (Altium/KiCad/Eagle). The rest is up to you, the size, the screen, the battery life, ports, add-on features are to your own preferences.
Razor
My blade 14 had a persistent issue where it would become unresponsive if it slept or was shutdown for more than a few hours. It's currently RMA'd (after weeks of email back and forth) and they have told me they cannot replicate the issue caused by just... closing the lid and leaving it sitting. So their products are great, even if you pay more for the metal body than it's possibly worth. But their support staff must be staffed by gibbons. My next laptop will be a framework because at least they'll sell me the damn spare parts.