mac air vs mac pro for psych research

[Phipps]

Hi:

Anybody here with experience, pro-cons etc. mac air vs mac pro? Specifically, I need to find out whether either of the two is performing significantly better (i.e., worth the extra money for a mac pro) when doing statistics or using software programs for psych research purposes. Large amounts of data to be imported etc. ANY leads, thoughts, feedback for either of the two machines would be greatly appreciated!!!

Thx,
Ms. Phipps

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[Paulie5116]

Hi:

Anybody here with experience, pro-cons etc. mac air vs mac pro? Specifically, I need to find out whether either of the two is performing significantly better (i.e., worth the extra money for a mac pro) when doing statistics or using software programs for psych research purposes. Large amounts of data to be imported etc. ANY leads, thoughts, feedback for either of the two machines would be greatly appreciated!!!

Thx,
Ms. Phipps

Great question! I am also interested in hearing responses to this and, in addition, I heard that the most recent Mac OS (Lion I believe) cannot run the most recent SPSS program. If anyone knows whether this is accurate and, if so, I would appreciate hearing possible solutions/alternatives.

Thanks!

 

[APPICSucks]

I have an older macbook pro and new macbook air. I have SPSS 20 running on the macbook air and it's as fine as SPSS can be. SPSS is pretty crappy and I prefer to use desktops at school with SAS. I've done a bit of work with very large epi data sets in both and really nothing is great when you have 70-250k observations.
All that being said, the macbook air more than meets my needs and the solid state drive is really what makes the difference in performance. A macbook pro with solid state drive would be great to have, but pricey, so the air is great. The only con I can think of is the 13 inch screen, but that wasn't enough to turn me off from the purchase.

 

[PsychPhDone]

I use a MacBook Pro, on which I run SAS on parallels/windows, which it handles really well. I do have a netbook that's non-mac (aka cheaper) and that's combo has worked out well for me. Not sure how much the Air runs these days but my guess was that my combo costs as much as an Air.

 

[RGirl]

Definitely check out what Stats packages you want to use beforehand. I bought a new Macbook around two years ago with Snow Leopard, and had to pay out of pocket for SPSS 18 (actually, PASW, for that brief weird period of time-- what was that?!) because my department only provided a free download of SPSS 17, which didn't work on Snow Leopard.

Even now, I'm trying to run some analyses that SPSS won't do, and Lisrel and the trial version of AMOS don't work on Macs.

 

[Phipps]

Thanks for your responses! I was not so much thinking of SPSS but of other software programs I will use in order to analyze data (quantitative/qualitative) such as STATISTICA, NVivo and the like. So, I was hoping that maybe people have used mac air or mac pro for applications other then SPSS. I guess I would do SPSS stuff at a school comp and import then...
So, anybody here who has experience with software other then SPSS, used on a mac??
Thx

 

[APPICSucks]

The only other stats package that I've used on either of my macs is R, which has way more functionality than either SAS or SPSS. R has really great charting and plotting abilities, latent variable, mixed modeling, simulation studies, etc.

I haven't found anything that I needed from a stats package that R could not do. The best part is it's completely free and open source!