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kentuckyfried · Apr 18, 2006, 07:50 PM

Is the Macbook Pro in a mature enough state to recommend to a PC user yet, especially in the a job involving the sciences or statistics?

My friend needs to buy a laptop to perhaps do some work at home. I was going to throw out the possibility of running the apps she needs natively, but those bastards at Microsoft still haven't released MS Access for Mac.

Here's the software she needs to use, she works in Public Health, and the job requires alot of statistics work:

SAS
SPSS
Textpad or something equivalent
Microsoft Access

The main alternative is to run all this stuff under Windows XP, but I'm not sure if she's going to bother trying to figure out how to use BootCamp to get XP onto a MBP.

If you guys have recommendations on PC laptops (if it really comes down to an issue of cost and convenience), please throw out your 2 cents too.

MacG33k · Apr 18, 2006, 08:05 PM

I work in pharmaceutical and use SAS extensively. Forget about running it on Mac, IBM laptops are the only alternative IMHO. I use IBM T42 for SAS. However, considering the fact that SAS runs on Unix, who knows.

mduell · Apr 18, 2006, 08:33 PM

Look into Parallels VM for OSX.

Gossamer · Apr 19, 2006, 09:25 AM

SPSS has a good Mac package. http://www.spss.com/spss_mac/

However, it's quite expensive and SPSS seems to have lost interest in updating it. This might actually be one situation where the dual-boot system makes sense. I love my Mac, but I'd really like to be able to run SPSS on it and there's no way I'll spring for the Mac version since I already have it on my work laptop.

kentuckyfried · Apr 22, 2006, 09:29 PM

Thanks guys.

Do any of you think that all these apps can be run on an old IBM Thinkpad 600e? I'm not really familiar about any of this stuff and I'm not sure how slowly it's gonna run. Apparently this laptop is a 366 mhz beast, lol. But it's available for free from somebody I know.

My other buddy, who was a former Mac turned PC owner, is advising the friend who needs a laptop not to buy any new PC hardware (outside of a new mac) until Vista comes out, since running Vista will require new hardware anyhow. Buying a PC right now, according to him, is like flushing that money spent down the toilet.

mduell · Apr 22, 2006, 09:48 PM

Originally Posted by kentuckyfried

My other buddy, who was a former Mac turned PC owner, is advising the friend who needs a laptop not to buy any new PC hardware (outside of a new mac) until Vista comes out, since running Vista will require new hardware anyhow. Buying a PC right now, according to him, is like flushing that money spent down the toilet.

Vista runs and will run on plenty of current hardware. Could you ask your "other buddy" why he thinks it won't run on todays hardware?

Barefoot Matt · Apr 22, 2006, 10:03 PM

Perhaps otherbuddy doesn't yet know that Vista isn't going to use EFI as previously planned. That would have required new hardware, right?

On the original topic, I was trained on Statistica, so I'm still reliant on windows PCs for my stats work. Blast! I'm working on learning how to use JMP IN, which runs on macs.

kentuckyfried · Apr 22, 2006, 10:05 PM

Originally Posted by mduell

Vista runs and will run on plenty of current hardware. Could you ask your "other buddy" why he thinks it won't run on todays hardware?

I misquoted him. Actually, he said it will run on current hardware, but it will run really, really slow. As when XP first came out and ran like shiet on the existing hardware of that time.

Barefoot Matt · Apr 22, 2006, 10:10 PM

Originally Posted by kentuckyfried

As when XP first came out and ran like shiet on the existing hardware of that time.

Haha. Until I got my MBP, I was running XP on a machine that I bought with Windows 98. I think it was actually like 2 years old by the time I bought XP, and it lasted me almost another 4 years after that.

mduell · Apr 22, 2006, 10:16 PM

Originally Posted by Barefoot Matt

Perhaps otherbuddy doesn't yet know that Vista isn't going to use EFI as previously planned. That would have required new hardware, right?

Support for EFI doesn't imply that it wouldn't also support BIOS.

Originally Posted by kentuckyfried

I misquoted him. Actually, he said it will run on current hardware, but it will run really, really slow. As when XP first came out and ran like shiet on the existing hardware of that time.

Complete FUD. The latest beta runs quite well on my Pentium M 1.86/X300 64MB with all the graphical eyecandy enabled. XP ran fine on 2001 hardware if you had 256MB RAM (which every computer since what, 1998, could support).