The Starving Student
How to get your dream Mac without blowing your entire college fund.

The Basics.

If going to school is your full-time job, you’ll need a Mac that can go wherever you do. That’s a laptop, of course, and for the typical starving student, we’d recommend a MacBook to start. At press time, the 2.1GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook (www.apple.com) came with a bare-bones price tag of $1,099, but we have a hunch that by the end of the year, you might see the MacBook’s base price inching closer to $999. If possible, we recommend starting with a 2.4GHz processor and 250GB hard drive ($1,499 as configured) and bumping the RAM up to a total of 4GB after the fact ($49.99 from OWC, www.macsales.com; and $51.99 from Crucial, www.crucial.com). Although Apple makes some of the comfiest notebook keyboards around, Apple’s Wireless Keyboard ($79, www.apple.com) and Wireless Mighty Mouse ($69, www.apple.com) come in supremely handy—especially if you’re usually using your notebook on a desk.

Desktop use is the other reason we recommend the Rain Design mStand ($49.90, www.raindesigninc.com).It keeps the notebook stable and lets you raise the screen a bit so there’s room on the desk for a wireless keyboard and mouse. Of course, the beauty of the wireless keyboard is that it can communicate with the MacBook from afar, making it possible to control the ’Book sitting on a desk from across the room while you’re, say, lying on your bed or lounging in a beanbag chair. Meanwhile, LaCie’s USB & FireWire Hub ($89.99, www.lacie.com) magically multiplies the number of ports on your MacBook, giving you spots to plug in four USB and two FireWire devices. It also sports a tiny desktop fan for when your dorm room gets too stuffy. You’ve most likely got a pair of earbuds for your iPod already, but to listen to music at any hour without bugging your dorm mate, Sennheiser’s PX 100 collapsible headphones ($69.95, www.sennheiserusa.com) are compact but comfortable, and you can fold them up and stow them in your backpack for use with your MacBook at the library or coffee house. Since you’ll need to use your Mac setup to print papers, a sturdy printer is in order—and reliable inkjet printers, such as the HP Photosmart D5460 Printer ($99.99, www.hp.com), are refreshingly affordable. 

Extras.

A backpack to tote your ’Book—and your books—is a must-have for any student, starving or not. Finding the perfect pack can be a subjective endeavor, but the Timbuk2 Underground Daypack ($85, www.timbuk2.com) comes as close as we’ve seen to perfection constructed from ballistic nylon. It holds your MacBook, textbooks, iPod, a sweatshirt, and so on, while two large exterior pockets put other necessities (wallet, keys, mints) in easy reach, and there’s a water-bottle holder too.  Without assuming too much about “the kids these days,” we’re betting it’s not a reach to take it for granted that the typical student is already packing an iPod of some variety. So although it’s not a Mac add-on per se, the Griffin PowerDock 2 ($49.99, www.griffintechnology.com) has slots for two iPods (or an iPod and an iPhone), and juices them up simultaneously—so if you’re feeling generous, you can offer to charge your dorm mate’s ’Pod, too.

Keep your ’Pod family charged up and ready to rock.

Step it Up A Notch.

If you’ve got about a grand more to spend on your rig, you’ll want to step up to a 2.4GHz 15-inch MacBook Pro with 2GB AM, and a 250GB 5,400-rpm hard drive ($2,049 as configured, www.apple.com). Just as we did with the MacBook, we’re going to advise you to step up to a total of 4GB of RAM after your ’Book arrives ($49.99 from Other World Computing, 
www.macsales.com, and $51.99 from Crucial, www.crucial.com). This setup will work well for business travelers too, and for that user profile, we also recommend adding the Apple MagSafe Airline Adapter ($49, www.apple.com). A pair of earmuff-style headphones will stand you in good stead whether you’re a businessperson doing a lot of airplane travel or a student rocking out at all hours between study sessions. Check out the Sennheiser HD515 ($129.99, www.sennheiser.com), which combine the perfect balance of comfort (they weigh a mere 9 ounces) and sound quality.

Sennheiser’s HD515 Gaming ’phones have shiny chrome accents.

Stash all your digital stuff on the My Book Home Edition.

In the printer department, the Canon Pixma MP620 Photo ($149.99, www.usa.canon.com) is a capable all-in-one that even lets you print photos taken on a camera phone wirelessly via Bluetooth. If you’re a typical student, you spend more than you probably should buying MP3s—the key word there is buying—so you’re going to need plenty of storage for all that digital property. The Western Digital My Book Home Edition 500GB external drive ($159.99, www.wdc.com) can house music library without burning up too much cash.

A Physics Geek and His Mac

Name: Andre Bach
Occupation: grad student in physics
Gear: 15-inch MacBook Pro (2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM)

Someday, physics grad student Andre Bach might be responsible for discovering what governs the particles that make up everything on Earth—and he uses a Mac.

Andre Bach is a physics grad student at UC Berkeley doing research in Switzerland at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which just happens to be the world’s leading lab in particle research. Bach works on a project with the James Bond-ish name of the ATLAS experiment. ”We aim to discover the Higgs boson,” Bach explains, not really clearing things up for us physics know-nothings (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson). “The Higgs boson,” says Bach, “is the only thing in the standard model of particle physics that hasn’t yet been seen.” The goal of the project is also “to uncover evidence for new theories and phenomena.” They want to know more about the fundamental laws governing particles that make up everything on Earth and in the known universe. To do so, the team at CERN working on ATLAS speeds up protons to almost the speed of light, smashes them together, and analyzes the particles that result.

Bach uses a Mac at the lab and at home for his personal computing. His needs run a little heavier on the horsepower than the average student, considering his area of study, which is why he uses a MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM and two displays (“courtesy of our tax dollars”). “One big advantage to using a Mac in the field of particle physics is that all of the dedicated servers/supercomputers we use for storing and analyzing data are totally Unix, so the *nix background of the Mac makes interfacing with them effortless,” Bach says. “I get all of the compatibility and command-line power of a Linux personal machine with all the ‘it just works’ quality and shininess of the Mac.” Besides Mac staples like Apple Mail, iTunes, and Mozilla Firefox, Bach runs a cadre of physics geek tools, including Mathematica, a Mac version of GNU Emacs called Aquamacs, Terminal, X11, and a specialty data-analysis package. For his personal stuff, Bach uses Aperture to organize and process photos shot with his Nikon D40. If money were no object and he could have his true dream setup, Bach says he’d double up on Macs, plunking an eight-core 3.2GHz Mac Pro with at least4GB of RAM, the GeForce 8800 GT graphics card, and “all the fixings,” plus an Apple 30-inch Cinema HD Display on his desk. While he’s visiting Fantasyland, he’d also throw in a 1.8GHz MacBook Air with a solid-state drive for travel. Back in the real world, Bach says his MacBook Pro provides “the requisite balance of power and expandability.”