Good laptop for beginning designer?

Hello everyone! I’m currently about to enter my junior year of college was admitted into the University of Washington Seattle’s Informatics program with an emphasis in Human Computer Interaction. I don’t know what laptop I want to get for the program so I decided to come onto this forum to see what you all recommend. My friend who’s a UX Designer at Amazon recommended a macbook pro 15, but I personally like a 13. What specs do you recommend and why? Also what programs should I have downloaded as well?

HI! so I think working on a laptop when creating wireframes is really confining. I have an Mac Book Pro that’s about 2 years old (retina display), but when I’m creating a wire frame or anything I need to see a lot of detail, I plug in a LARGE monitor, the monitor runs fine off my laptop.

Although I don’t do a lot of designing these days, I love my Macbook Air (13") for portability, and like @inca431 I plug it into an old iMac monitor when I’m at my desk.

As far as software goes, see this topic for some good advice.

+1 for the Macbook Air: lightweight, portable, and the battery lasts all day. @HAWK or other more experienced designers could confirm, but I doubt you really need anything more powerful for most UX software.

I know of people that use Macbook Airs as full dev machines, so it would be fine for UX tools.

So world buying a MacBook pro 13 i7 16gb 256 an overkill?

I would say that it’s more than you need, yes, but if you can afford it, then go for it!

Well I have to do some front and back end development as part of my program
at the University of Washington, but thanks for all the advice!