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School of Journalism and New Media
University of Mississippi

Laptop Requirement

Students seeking degrees from the University of Mississippi School of Journalism and New Media will be required to complete class exercises and produce content using personal laptops. While the school currently provides some computer labs, you may not be able to complete all of your assignments if you rely solely on school equipment and software.

Students seeking a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism are required to purchase a laptop and the appropriate software, prior to enrolling in JOUR 271.

Students seeing a Bachelor of Science in Integrated Marketing Communication are required to purchase a laptop prior to enrolling in IMC 205.

Before purchasing a laptop, be sure to check the system requirements listed below. The school recommends purchasing an Apple laptop, but students can go with a Windows laptop if they prefer.

With choosing a laptop, please consider purchasing a support warranty of a minimum of three years.

Apple

Apple is transitioning into making their own chip sets and moving away from Intel.   Given that we would like for you to have the longest possible use of this investment, we therefore suggest going with their M1 chip.  This M1 chip is only available with their MacBook Air or MacBook 13 inch.  When choosing either of these platforms with the M1 chip, please ensure that you are getting one with at least an 8-core GPU.  This will ensure you will have the power to do graphic editing.

Please remember that these Apple laptop are not user accessible.  Therefore, Memory and Storage at the frontend is absolutely critical for long term use.  Thereby, we recommend 16G of memory and a minimum of 1TB SSD storage.

Windows

There are many manufactures of Windows based laptops.  Therefore, please consider using the following specifications in choosing your selection:

  • 9th Generation i7 processor or better.
  • Screen resolution of 3840 x 2160 @ 60Hz – 4K capable.
  • A dedicated graphics card like AMD or NVidia.
  • A minimum of 16GB DDR4-2666MHz memory.
  • And finally, a minimum of 1 TB SSD storage.