Laptop for Epidemiology?

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n3t

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I am starting an MPH in epidemiology in the fall, and I am going to be purchasing a new laptop. I have always been a Mac user, but I have heard others say that epi programs use software that is more compatible with PCs. If I am getting a new laptop, I want to make sure I will not have trouble with software, but I also do not want to switch to a PC if there won't be an actual benefit.

Does anyone have any thoughts? Thanks!

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No knowledge on this stuff from an epi perspective, but I was a Mac user all my life before buying a Surface two years ago. If you do decide to switch, I would definitely recommend it.
 
This thread has some pretty good ideas: MPH - Laptop for Epidemiology

I do want to warn you about SAS and macs. You will only be able to download SAS studio on a mac. As someone who was a self-taught SAS Enterprise Guide user, this would not have been acceptable to me. But, many of my classmates were first time SAS users who had no problem using SAS studio. It really depends on your preferences.
 
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I have to agree that running SAS is problematic on macs. I gave up trying to use my macbook and now spend hours in the university library doing SAS homework on the library PC. Most of the people in my SAS Lab use macs too - and all of us have had issues, which I know about because we started a support group. The problem is that to use SAS you have to either partition your hard-drive (not recommended - slows your computer way down), or download a "virtual app" to use the Studio (on-line) version which makes saving/accessing files problematic. Another issue is that most of the books and on-line resources for SAS are for the PC edition, which is different enough from SAS Studio to cause problems. One mac-owning MPH student from the year ahead of me told me she ended up going out and buying a cheap PC laptop just to run SAS. I don't know if SPSS or R have the same compatibility issues. I'd check with the school and see what system they use.
 
I'm also a Mac user and my Epi program primarily used SAS. I was commuting quite a ways for my degree so using the schools computer lab wasn't an option.

What I wound up doing was downloading VMWare Fusion and partitioning my hard drive, running Windows on the partitioned drive with SAS. It was easy to set up as I'm not super computer savy. It worked well at first but SAS takes up the ton of space along with the partitioned drive so as I used my laptop more space became an issue and my laptop fan would be going nuts. But I think you have a decent amount of memory, probably 75-100 gigs just for the partitioned drive, SAS, and all your programs, you can do okay.

I used the Mac side for everything else. It's an 8 year old laptop, only major issue I had was the battery bit the dust on year 6.

I've run R and R studio on my Mac a bit and haven't noticed any issues or heard of any. Love R. Seems most of my grad classmates used Macs and the rest used Asus computers.

Part way through I stopped bringing my mac and mostly just used my ipad at school and the Mac for assigments at home.
 
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I personally prefer the Macbook Pro just because I have one. I've run SPSS, R, and Stata on my Pro and it's been spectacular. No glitches, no lags, nothing!
 
At work I use a Mac laptop AND share a PC desktop. The Mac laptop is used to run R/Rstudio, STATA, SPSS, as well as general Office programs like excel and powerpoint. Mac laptops are awesome, and 90% of the time you are not coding anyways. The shared PC desktop at work is used for SAS only. Literally, just for SAS. I tried to use SAS on my Mac via the "Parallels" software, but it requires a ton of hard drive space and is functionally terrible in my opinion.

Do you know what software your department prefers to teach?
 
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