[Flieger]

A lot of my friends used Macs but ran Windows. I had an HP that did alright. Max out the RAM.

I want a CD drive personally so wouldn't consider an Air.

Depends on what kind of engineering I suppose. CAD programs can be real memory hogs when you start doing FEA or CFD. Animation and modeling isn't so bad.

I was able to remote desktop to a school server for doing MATLAB from home which was sweet. Otherwise we had labs with Solidworks, MATLAB, etc. on them that were for your particular major only, though they would get really busy before some big project was due or before finals.

I ran Solidworks student on my laptop, was much better for FSAE than being tied to the labs.