Complete Noob with questions

Alright guys, i'm a senior in high school and am planning on majoring in computer engineering next year in college. I am looking into buying a laptop and more specifically a macbook. First off, does anyone know if there are any disadvantages to having a mac instead of a pc when programming in like java and c++ and whatnot? Really, is there anything that i would need to do in that major with my computer that i could not do on a mac?

My seconds question is, what software do macbook's come installed with? i-work, i-life, logic express, final cut express, aperature? And i heard, though this may be way off, that there is a ton of free software out there for macs. Any of these that don't come with the laptop, can you download them for free or do you have to purchase them?

Thanks for your time whoever answers these questions, and i may have more soon...

You can get an idea of the freeware available at versiontracker.com and macupdate.com, to name two. Make sure the categories are OS X or Universal Binary, and run searches for "freeware" (without the quotes).

Welcome to Mac Forums Richard!!

With respect to programming, I guess it really depends on who the audience for your programs is. If you are planning to program for the Windows crowd, clearly a Mac isn't the best platform. Ditto for Linux.

If you are looking to do cross platform programming, a Mac can work very well.

It all depends on what/who you are targetting with your programming efforts.

With respect to what comes with your Mac, iLife comes with it, but big commercial packages like FCP and Aperture do not. If you go to the Apple web site and look at the machine you are interested in, it lists the software that comes with it.

Good luck!!

Research Xcode, which comes with the Mac OS X software. It includes gcc (C) and g++ (C++). For college that should be all you need for programming. I'm a Jr at Maryland taking on Information Systems with a Major in Networking, but it seems I've been recently focused on programming in C++. The Mac has been my all in one system, and for the stuff I can't do in the Apple environment I load up Parallels and boot to Windows. That or dual boot to Windows which is running Visual C++.

Good Luck,
Jay