PC personally. Partially it's inertia and not having the interest in learning a whole new 'ecosystem' and way of doing things. And I do think most engineering software is designed for PCs. My impression has always been that Macs are targeted more toward 'creative fields' like publishing and graphics and PCs more toward general functional work. Personally, I've never had a need to run multiple operating systems at the same time. Apple was admittedly more cutting edge with innovations in the early days. In the early 90's we were using PCs with the DOS operating system (the dark ages by today's standards) while Apple was pioneering the now common use of GUI with icons. Microsoft realized that was the wave of the future and pretty much copied it with Windows.
Apple always seemed a bit uppity and 'exclusive'. They make finely sculpted and crafted phones and computers, but honestly, a $450 Dell PC will run spreadsheets and 2D Cad just fine. If you need to do large 3d BIM models, high end animations, or huge analysis models, you'll probably need to upgrade to a higher end model, but again, I think you'll find a comparable PC much less costly than an Apple product. With Apple, I feel like you're paying a premium for the exclusive aura they've worked so hard to cultivate.
My daughter attends Ohio Sate and her freshman year they rolled out a program where all incoming freshmen got iPads and (in theory) the professors were all supposed to use iPads for their classes. She quickly found that many of the programs professors wanted them to use weren't available for iPads or were dumbed down versions that didn't have all the features the PC versions had (or didn't run as well). And she's not even in engineering. She and most of her classmates had to break down and get PC's to be able to function and do their work in many classes. That was just the reality. Admittedly, she likes her iPad and still does most of her work on it, but in any field you have to run with the hardware that runs the majority of the software you need to use.
Going back a few years, I had an early version of the Windows Phone. It was a great phone.....but there were very few apps for it. Most apps were written for either Android or Apple phones. For the next phone I switched to Android even though I liked the Windows phone. Similar to PC's, you can get good Android phones much cheaper than iPhones and they do everything most people want and need them to do. the lack of apps basically killed the Windows Phone.
Apple products (so I've been told...) have great build quality and great functionality. Not everyone can afford to (or wants, or needs) to pay their exclusivity premium though.
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Greg Thein, PE
Cleveland, OH
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Original Message:
Sent: 12-21-2021 06:19 PM
From: Christopher Seigel
Subject: Mac vs PC in Engineering
Another computer question for you all - Mac vs PC in Engineering
I had a friend in college who was in my engineering classes, and I recall that he was the only student to use a mac instead of a PC.
I recently asked him to remind me as to why he preferred a MacBook at the time. He explained that just under 10 years ago when we were in undergrad, he preferred his MacBook because it could simultaneously run multiple operating systems at a time, and he thought the interface was cleaner as well. However, he also noted that as of recent years, he has found that both operating systems and hardware producers are a lot more similar in performance than they used to be.
I know one commPoston answer to why most engineers use PCs is simply because most engineering software is written strictly for Windows.
Does anyone else have preferences one way or the other? Or features that they like about one type of computer (or operating system) that they wish were available on the other?
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Christopher Seigel P.E., M.ASCE
Civil Engineer
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