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2. Computer And Environment Setup

Computer Requirements#

In order to participate in Make School, you must have a laptop that meets the the following requirements:

  1. An Apple Laptop
  2. At least 8 MB of Random Access Memory (RAM)
  3. At least 100 GB of Solid State Drive (SSD) Storage
  4. A battery that holds a charge
  5. A fully-functioning keyboard
  6. A fully-functioning screen

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Why do we require your laptop to be from Apple? We have found that it is difficult to support the tools/languages we use in our fast-paced learning environment on a PC. Whether it's web, mobile, or data science, a Mac (OSX) environment is much easier to work with both for the students and the instructor, and also goes far to helping guarantee a students success by minimizing hardware issues.

Unfortunately, we cannot offer any sort of exceptions to this policy, students in the past who we have allowed to use workarounds such as a "hackintosh" or virtual machines have not been successful. If you cannot meet these requirements, please review the Laptop section of our student handbook for available options on how to find an economical laptop that meets these requirements.

If you have any questions about the laptop requirements, please message questions@makeschool.com.

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Ensure that your computer meets these requirements, or that you have a plan in place to obtain a computer that does meet these requirements before continuing through the remainder of this chapter.

Operating System

Next you must download and install - or update - your operating system. The operating system is the software that allows your whole computer to function. This step is important so that we're all starting off with the same operating system version, as there are minor differences between them.

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Update your MacBook's operating system (OSX) to the most recent stable version of the Apple operating system

[info] This download may take multiple hours to complete, so please start it now before continuing.

[info] Note you may need to delete some files to make sure you have enough space to download the applications in this tutorial