M3 versus the M4 chip in a Mac Book Pro

Without knowing what your academic studies might require it's difficult to offer much specific advice, but for general use - web browsing, writing letters and papers, playing movies, etc - you probably wouldn't see much if any difference between a MacBook Pro with an M3 vs an M4, everything else being equal. If your specific studies will have higher demands, as for instance a high-level programming course, medical analysis, or video production, an M4 might offer significant performance benefits. You might ask your university's IT department or your particular program administrator and see if they have any specific recommendations.

Note that Apple is no longer selling M3-based MacBook Pros except perhaps as refurbished units, so any M3-based MBP would either be leftover stock at a reseller - probably fine as long as the reseller is officially authorized - or used.

Regards.

kumarbc wrote:

Looking at buying a laptop and wondering what chip would be better for a university student. The usage would include academic work, browsing, social media, movies etc as the usual.

The chip is more or less irrelevant. What's more important are things like display size, external display support, and number of ports.

Apple does NOT change keyboards. What you buy is what that Mac has, FOREVER. if it dies Apple will only replace like for like.

Every keyboard has English glyphs on the keys as well -- otherwise you could not surf over to Apple.com.

All it takes to change languages is to select a new keyboard translation.

kumarbc wrote:

I guess a mac book pro with a swiss keyboard could be changed to an international English keyboard

No, if the printing on the keys is important to you, make sure to get the one you want. For new Macs, Apple's online stores normally offer a variety of keyboards, which you can check by pretending to buy one. International English is not available in the US, but I think British English is almost the same thing.

You can of course make any language keyboard behave like International English by just setting the input source to US or ABC in the system settings.

You're very welcome.