Five Pros & Cons of Getting a Mac for Students

When you’re preparing for college, there are a lot of things that rush through your head. There are so many things that you need to get ready, and you’re fearing that you may forget something. You are thinking about the books that you may need to get. You wonder if you’re going to live in the dormitory or rent an apartment. 

If you’re planning to rent an apartment, you’re looking for jobs that you can get hired to, to maintain paying the tuition and rent. And you also think about your future dissertation. Will you be able to write it on your own or require “edit my paper online” service, as you’re going to be busy with jobs and other subjects? Moreover, there are tons of essays and research papers that you’re going to write on your way to the dissertation. 

To go through the piles of writing assignments, you need your brain and time. If you lack the latter, you can always rely on the best research paper writing services, while resting assured that your order is done by professionals. But what do you need to write or order writing assignments? Yes, you require a laptop. Choosing a laptop, you should consider things like:

• Battery life
• Screen size
• Performance
• Weight
• Connectivity

All those aspects are important. But what if you have brand loyalty? Nothing will make you ditch Mac for Microsoft. So, if you think of using Mac for your college studies, you need to consider all the benefits and disadvantages. So, let’s check them out without any further ado. Let’s start with the advantages first. 

Usability

The first thing that almost every user who has had experience with Mac and other laptops will emphasize is the usability of Macs. Whenever you’re using, let’s say, Microsoft, you’re kinda finding hidden features every day. Yes, things got much easier since the release of Windows 8 and onwards, but there are still features that users may not know about. Simply, because they don’t know how to search for them.

When it comes to Mac, you can easily find whatever you want using the Search Spotlight. Click on it, and simply type in what you’re looking for. And that’s it. When it comes to doing writing assignments, Pages offer way more fonts than Microsoft Word, and you can still save the work in formats that are readable on laptops that run on Microsoft. 

Security

Another important benefit of using a Mac is security. You know, when you have a Microsoft computer, you can connect almost anything to it. And you can install almost any third-party software on it. That may look like Microsoft’s advantage in terms of connectivity and integration — more on that later — with users, generally, missing the negative effect of it. 

Installing third-party software quite often means inviting malware to your computer. As things that you can connect to and install on Mac are generally Apple exclusive, there are fewer viruses that you can encounter. Moreover, as the OS is getting updated almost every year, it’s quite hard to develop a virus that can effectively harm your Mac. 

It seems a bit funny, how something which may look like a defeat in the Mac vs. Microsoft war market-wise, means a victory user-wise. You see, Mac has only a 10% share of the desktop/laptop market, compared to Microsoft. But that means that far fewer malware and spyware types are developed to affect macOS. That allows for identifying them easily and protecting the system from them. 

Boot Camp

Let’s imagine that for some reason, aside from the macOS, you need to install another operating system on your laptop. With some computers it is unimaginable, but Mac allows you to install Linux or Windows with ease. You can use Boot Camp to get any additional operating system on your Mac. Switching between the systems is extremely easy. 

Boot Camp was first released in a form of the unsupported beta version on Mac OS X Tiger, all the way back in 2005. Since then, Boot Camp remains a built-in utility for all types of macOS. So, if you need an additional operating system, just use Boot Camp, and easily switch between the partitions. If later you need to remove the additional partition, you can use Boot Camp for these purposes as well. 

Connectivity

Now, we’re moving to the disadvantages. We’ve already talked about the positive aspects of the limitations of connectivity and integration when it comes to Mac. Yes, while that means fewer encounters with viruses, it also means that you’re practically limited to the Apple ecosystem. In other words, it’s better to have an iPhone, iPad, and so on. The same goes for things that you need to install on your Mac, with a few exceptions. 

Speaking of connectivity, owning a Mac, you can run into problems with the shortage of ports. Older Macs tend to have like two USB ports, nowadays, it’s better to have a USB-C Thunderbolt, which means additional expenses. Also, Apple is known for adding and removing things at random. 

Updates

Updates make your Mac protected from viruses, but they come with a certain price. As soon as your macOS is updated to the latest version, you may find that programs that were running smoothly on the past version won’t run anymore. That means additional expenses if the current version of the program doesn’t support the updated OS. 

Of course, as a loyal customer you may get a discount, but nonetheless. A discount means that you’re going to pay, let’s say, $19.99 instead of $39.99. And that can seriously disappoint certain users, who were looking forward to upgrading to the latest version of macOS. 

Final Thoughts

Brand loyalty is great, but sometimes it means sacrificing common sense. Gladly, that’s not the case with Macs. Mac will serve you well throughout your college life. Just keep in mind that you may need an adapter for connectivity. And when it comes to updates, learn whether the programs that run on the current version will run on the newer one.