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i hope it remains at least as easy as it is now for poor people to make it through school without worrying too much about this.
by sachmanb 18y ago
i hope it remains at least as easy as it is now for poor people to make it through school without worrying too much about this.
- jerf 18y agoLaptops are now down to $250 and probably still dropping a bit more yet before even next fall's term. That's getting down to the same class of cost as books (actually I spent more than that on books most terms, in ~1996 dollars no less), and you can probably use aid money on the laptop. This laptop will do everything a non-engineering major will need, and a great deal of what a non-engineering major might want, barring 3D games. I understand that even $250 can be a lot, but I want to make the point that if you still conceptualize a laptop as a ~$1000 item, it's not really like that anymore. Since the laptop companies aggressively compete for the college student market, I bet that barring massive inflation, somebody manages to offer a $199 laptop for next fall that will do just as much as the adequate laptops of today. Interestingly, a laptop is now cheaper than a desktop. I couldn't find a desktop at Dell just now for under $279, and that didn't include a monitor.
- sown 18y agoI don't think solidworks will make it. :)
- JunkDNA 18y agoI recall spending hundreds of dollars a semester on books. I distinctly remember my Organic Chemistry text was well in excess of $100. The cost of a computer amortized over the entire college experience is not a whole lot compared to other costs. For most people, a netbook would be able to get the job done. It might not be ideal, but you could make it work. Even for CS majors, you could just use a netbook and fire up an EC2 small instance if you needed something more powerful. You can get a lot done on EC2 before hitting the price of two slices of pizza and a coke.