Transitioning to the college lifestyle can be awkward at first. Being away from home, having a heavy workload and still wanting to hangout with friends can be a lot to manage all at once.

Luckily, your Mac can help relieve a little of that stress throughout the school year. In today’s video, take a look at these five hot Mac tips that can make your new year of college easier: be prepared for thieves, find the best way to take notes and more.

Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV on YouTube to catch all our latest videos.

You’re going to college, which means plenty of sleepless nights, lots of good memories, and maybe a little studying on the side. The truth is that college can be stressful, so it never hurts to be too prepared.

Luckily, there are tons of excellent apps out there on both the Mac and iOS to help you survive. Here are 10 of the best:

Apple has today kicked off its annual Back to School promotion through the Apple online store. As it did in 2012, the Cupertino company is offering a $100 App Store gift card with every new Mac, or a $50 card with a new iPad.

This year’s promotion also includes the iPhone, which now comes with a $50 gift card, too.

How many college-aged girls do you know running around with broken iPhone screens? 15? 20? All of them? It takes the average college girl like 2.37 days to shatter her new iPhone screen, or at least that’s the stereotype some choose to believe.

To make things easier for college girls, Apple is launching the iPhone 5C. It comes with a pre-shattered screen so all your friends think you live a wild and crazy life. It’s genius. It’s like buying pre-faded jeans. It’s also totally fake, but The Onion is on to something in their latest hilarious but fake news story that covered the launch of the fictitious device.

Here’s the video of the iPhone 5C’s launch:

Imagine jotting down a quick memo, tossing it into the air and having a little magical fairy swoop by and catch it, stashing it away safely for later reference. TopXNotes is the next best thing! We all know and love our Mac Stickies but imagine them on steroids. That is what you get with TopXNotes, the most comprehensive task manager yet. Let’s face it, Stickies aren’t fail proof and those quickly jotted notes can sometimes be crucial. TopXNotes constantly autosaves your notes and categorizes them to help insure anything worthy of being written down doesn’t accidentally fall through the cracks.

You’re going to college. That means huge lists of all the crap you need to start school of right. Not just books, furniture, clothing, mini-beer refrigerators, and all that junk, but also backpacks and probably some tech gear to get you through the semester.

For most people, the MacBook Air is the best laptop on the market. But if you’re going to college, you might not even need a laptop anymore. We think a lot of college students can get by and just buy an iPad instead of a MacBook Air. Here’s why.

The first week of college is filled with a bunch of crazy new things you have to adapt to if you want to make it out alive. Co-ed dorms. People with bad facial hair. Faux-Intellectuals. Scantly clad women. Demented professors. Weird cultish groups called fraternities. The absence of personal hygiene. And most importantly, the astronomical prices of textbooks.

Why have we had a congressional hearing on steroid use in baseball, but not a peep about college textbook prices? We thought that the iPad and eBooks were supposed to make education a whole lot cheaper, but most college students still buy physical textbooks. Here at Cult of Mac, for back to school season, we wanted to find out what’s cheaper: buying an iPad and only buying eTextbooks or going the traditional route and buying forty or fifty pounds worth of dead paper every semester.

Which is better for the penny-pinching student? The results are pretty surprising.

When it comes to talking about iOS devices in healthcare, most of think of doctors carrying iPads the way that they used to carry lengthy paper charts or clipboards. We think about doctors looking at X-rays and other diagnostic tests on an iPad, perhaps even using the iPad to illustrate a broken bone, illness, or surgical procedure.

Doctors, however, aren’t the only healthcare professionals to be embracing mobile technology. A new study shows that the vast majority of nurses have also embraced mobile devices, particularly the iPhone and other smartphones. It also highlights that differing needs of healthcare professionals when it comes to mobile technology.

Barnes & Noble’s announcement that it was spinning off its Nook business and that Microsoft would be a significant stakeholder in the new company raised a lot of eyebrows. The partnership seemed unnecessary in order to meet the goals of settling a patent dispute and ensuring a Nook app for Windows 8 tablets.

It turns out that Barnes & Nobel will be shifting its textbook business to the new company along with the Nook and that Microsoft’s $300 million investment will likely be centered around creating an e-textbook initiative that will likely compete head-on with Apple’s fledging iPad-based e-textbook business.

Apple’s e-textbook initiative, which the company launched in January along with iBooks Author and a revamped iTunes U service is aimed at K-12 schools rather than higher education. Higher education has a different set of needs when it comes to textbooks, study, and reference materials. There are also big differences in device/platform selection between K-12 and the college market.

In fact, these differences are probably a big part of why Apple decided to focus the majority of its e-textbook (and, by extension its iPad in education) effort on the K-12 market. It’s a market that yields Apple more growth opportunities now and down the road.