OWC Savings on *Factory Sealed* Apple iMac 5K
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Kid going to college or high school? Mine are.
These are great machines at a terrific price for a college student.
Don’t wreck your kid’s neck with a laptop (hunching over, terrible ergonomics)—get a desktop with a big screen (or a desktop and a laptop).
OWC sells a wide variety of used and factory sealed Macs.
James writes:
Although I understand your reasoning for choosing to send your girl(s) off to college with a desktop, let me share my experience.
My youngest son is maybe 7 years older than your daughter(s) and now a graduate mechanical engineer at Cal. He went off to college with an iMac desktop. Although fast, and blown away with university-grade internet speed (I think 90mbps at the time) the desktop isolated him to his room and after awhile there were psychological and social concerns with this. After he got a 13" Mac laptop everything changed. The new laptop was almost as fast if not faster than his desktop but it allowed him to take his work to the library where he could more easily collaborate with his peers in real time and that changed everything. And collaboration is a skill much emphasized today compared to when you and I were in school. Yes, you have to worry more about theft and there is something about the young adult brain that is unprepared for this.
As for my nephew, his desktop was also a source of isolation and near ruination --- video games. His parents eventually sprung for a laptop but not soon enough in my opinion, and they should have taken his desktop away. I suspect girls don't have these problems so much, but consider a laptop and if you do go that route make sure it is speedy enough for email and word processing but too wimpy to effectively run computer games.
DIGLLOYD: Each person is unique and boys are not girls—and I don’t have any boys (3 girls). My girls have never played video games and have no interest in them. Netflix is the bigger time-wasting risk!
But I didn’t explain fully—my daughter will have a basic laptop like the 2017 MacBook Pro 8GB / 128GB and a basic desktop (iMac 4K or iMac 5K) along with a 500GB Samsung T5 for storage between the two.
She greatly dislikes working on a tiny screen (just as I do), hence the desktop. And the laptop is needed for portability and classes, etc.
Writing a quality essay/paper or doing complex math (e.g. her interest in physics) is best done alone if one wishes to grow the mind. Through high school where she has nearly completed two years of college courses already, she works alone and is very focused—yet she has tremendous people skills at both school and work, where customers seek her out. She will be just fine.
As to groupthink (excuse me, collaboration), it has its place at times and when appropriate, it is of course very useful and productive to have. Yet it is over-emphasized to the point of groupthink today, certainly part of the heavy-handed collectivist trend in today’s schools (K-12 in particular as I am a witness for the last 16 years for 3 girls). Great minds did not sit around collaborating for their best ideas. I also think that collaboration is the antithesis of critical thinking (setting aside debate-type stuff).While a group can stimulate ideas and is therefore invaluable at times, it’s all a question of where/when/how much. I did not invent my 3 patents in a group; I though them up while alone and partly, while sleeping.