Buy a laptop based on what your kid requires rather than falling for the branding. The AI NPU in Intel is generally used for things such as facial recognition, background blurring, noise cancellation. While apple's neural engine does the same and is accessible to users who does data science ML work. As you indicate medicine is the preferred programme so you want a device that is stable and has long battery life rather than absolute processing power.

A decent intel/AMD laptop with 16GB and 512 of SSD storage with good after-sales support is what you need. Alternatively a macbook air with 16GB/512Gb of storage + applecare is excellent as well as its powerful, cool and very power efficient i.e. long battery life.

Allow your kid some money to subscribe to google drive, onedrive or icloud to backup his work. Laptops/tablets may breakdown and having his work on the cloud is good insurance.

For note-taking even a base ipad gen10 + apple pencil is good enough.

Presentations can generally be done remotely via Google Workspace/O365. But if a dongle is required can get it cheaply from shopee ie. USB C to HDMI dongle. VGA connection is getting very rare in unis, mostly HDMI.

This post has been edited by rush3508: Mar 6 2024, 05:24 PM

Ipad can take notes on O365 onenote which is accessible via App/cloud. This makes it transferrable between any devices.

I saw that you wrote Monash requires a lot of windows application. FYI Monash or generally private unis will provide software licenses to students during the entire course of their study and generally the licenses are both for Windows and Mac platform. You might want to double check on the list of software, speak to the university tech support for better clarity.

refer to the university's IT policy and software catalogue:

https://www.monash.edu/esolutions/students/...own-device-byod
https://www.monash.edu/esolutions/software/catalogue

I disagree with previous poster on Malaysia Monash must use Windows based. As someone who are familiar most unis are platform agnostic esp for Medicine or Pre-U programmes. Yes there are specific software that are platform dependent e.g. SAS etc but you wont generally encounter that.