Question about best choice of MAC laptop for wife PHD

[charlottef]

Dear SAS Community

I'm assisting my wife getting setup for her PHD writing, and want to get her the best choice of macbook laptop. 
She prefer the macbook air design, and battery life for daily life. But It appears SAS Statistics are rather CPU demanding? 

I have to admit I basically know nothing about SAS, so anybody with knowledge if:

- 13,3 inch Macbook Air, M1, 8GB ram, 256GB SSD is sufficient to get started working with health/economics statistics? 
- Would a 13,3inch Macbook Pro, M2 CPU, 8GB ram, 256GB SSD be a better choice? And would it potentially suffice?

Thank you in bunches for replies 😊
/Niels

[Reeza]

How large are the data sets she'll be working with? Health data sets are typically very large, economic data sets are rarely large IME.

Also, if she's using SAS not installed on her local computer, but through her school server, it won't matter, the internet speed will matter more.

Personally, any laptop I get would be 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD minimum for any type of analytical work. Fortunately I do everything in the cloud or work server these days.

[charlottef]

That makes sense. I believe she will be moving in and out of different data sets, but all health economics - in other words health, economics and their interaction in healthcare. She has an air now, that is like ten years old, and she was never really able use it like she wanted, during her masters in health economics.

I believe the program will be installed on her computer. Sounds excellent, being able to use a powerful server 👍🏻

I actually have a macbook pro, 2017, 2,9Ghz intel i7 Quad-core, with 512GB SSD and 16GB ram, that I only use for office work - work on a mac pro myself normally. Maybe she'd be better off taking that machine over?

[SASKiwi]

SAS isn't supported natively on MAC OSs. You can run SAS inside a Windows emulator or in a virtual installation like SAS Analytics Pro - this may not be advisable unless you reasonably tech savvy or want to process large data volumes. 

[charlottef]

Wow.. I'll have to ask her tomorrow (night here now), how she was able to work with it on her old AIR in the past. She's definitely no computer expert!
Thanks!

[Cynthia_sas · Accepted solution]

Hi:
If she used SAS with her Mac in the past, the chances are good that she either used a remote desktop to connect to a University system (which is a setup that some universities offer instead of a local install) or she may have used SAS OnDemand for Academics, which provides server access to SAS and SAS/STAT using a browser. In either of these cases, all the CPU usage would be on the server machine, not on her Mac.
Cynthia

[charlottef]

Excellent advise Cynthia! You just nailed it. Thank you so much 😊