Need a good laptop for an engineering major?

I have a macbook air and this thing is a BEAUTY. Have had it since last Christmas and have had no significant problems that come to memory. Plus if you have an iPhone and all that it goes together like marsh mellows and graham crackers. Thats just my suggestion. Goodluck, May the force be with you.

The Air is what some call an "ultrabook", which is a bit of a misnomer, since that category is actually a "semi-book". It is more than a tablet, but not nearly as powerful as the average notebook. The MacBook Pro 13-inch offers more options for more powerful processor. The Retina model has a much higher pixel count display for superb viewing.

One advantage of the Macs compared with PCs is they can run both Mac OS and Windows with ease. To have that same broad software availability on a PC would require a tedious and possibly unreliable hack job.

I use AutoCAD on my 13" Macbook Pro and it works good for 2D drawing, but its a little slow for the 3D part of things. I have a Windows partition (allows me to use Windows 8 on my Macbook) and I also have 16GB of RAM and its still a little slow for 3D stuff even on the Windows 8 partition. But my Macbook Pro is from Late 2011 so its not exactly up to date on the technology or hardware. Macbook Airs generally don't have much RAM, which is important using AutoCAD or Solidworks and other programs. I would get something with at the very least 4GB of RAM, but thats probably still a little low. Based on what I read 8GB is recommended, but 16GB would be good if you can afford it. I went with 16GB just because I got a good deal: like $20 extra for 16GB. Just about every computer with run these programs, especially a computer that is $700 - $800.

Whatever you do, its usually recommended by professionals and by professors that you have some sort of monitor for AutoCAD or Solidworks so that things are much easily seen and done. I believe California State Long Beach recommends at least 24" for a monitor. I use my 46" TV and its perfect with a wireless mouse and wireless keyboard, I just use a HDMI-Lightnight cable and the HDMI plugs straight into my TV and its like having an HD giant monitor. You could use RCA cables or DVI cables as well as long as your computer has the right output, but there are HDMI-DVI and HDMI-RCA cables for cheap on the internet so that shouldn't be a problem.

The Macbook Air is supposed to be the cheaper or dumbed down version of the Macbook Pro, so it probably won't have the kind of specs you are looking for such as RAM, hard drive space, and general performance. The Helix does have the capability of a laptop and a tablet, but most engineering work is not done with a smart pen and its hardly ever taught with one. Also, the Y40 says it can have up to 16GB of RAM while the Helix says it only goes up to 8GB of RAM, I'm not sure if this is standard RAM or if it is the maximum supported by the computer (my Macbook's max is 16GB but it only came with 4GB). The Y40 has the HDMI port I previously mentioned, but the Helix doesn't. The Y40 also has up to 1TB of hard drive space and I believe I read that the only other option was 512GB whereas the maximum hard drive space for the Helix is 256GB.

So its looking like the Y40 is the best option, unless you want the capability of a tablet as well as a laptop (Helix) or unless you want to have a Macbook. Windows computers can only run the Windows OS, but MacBooks can run both the Windows OS and the Mac OS, but the Air is going to be less powerful (meaning probably a little slower) than the other two options, but the quality will surely be second to none. So it all depends on what kind of stuff you want to do with these programs and how complicated that stuff gets, like I said I can do 2D AutoCAD with no problems but when I start to do 3D AutoCAD stuff my computer will start to lag a little bit.