MPH Epidemiology Student - Laptop

[m2p0h_20]

I'll be starting grad school soon and I will need to buy a new laptop. The school I'm going to uses mostly SAS and R. I was looking at buying macbook pro (16GB memory and 256GB storage). I think I'll be fine with R on a mac but I know that for SAS I would have to run something like parallels, vmware, or bootcamp. Has anyone used SAS on a macbook pro and what are your opinions on it? I don't really want to get a mac if it's going to end up giving me problems using a virtualization software. I was also thinking about looking at hp spectre x360, dell xps, and acer laptops. Which laptop do you think is best?

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[wholeheartedly]

I used SAS on my macbook with vmware. It went well for most of grad school, but eventually I did run out of storage and that really slowed things down and caused issues at the end of grad school. I had 256GB. Aside from that, I loved my mac.

 

[n3t]

I used SAS on my Macbook Pro with Parallels. I was a heavy SAS user during my MPH program and it worked like a charm! Couldn't have been happier with it. Very glad I went that route over getting a PC. I will say it got incredibly slow during my thesis due to the size of the datafiles I was keeping on it, but that's on me for not deleting old data sets.

 

[scubascuba]

I haven't used SAS on my mac but R does run significantly slower on mac than on PC which can be a little frustrating. If you're using it constantly it would probably get annoying but if you're only using it for a few assignments you'll be fine.