[R-SIG-Mac] Suggested New Mac for Heavy R Use

[Simon Urbanek]

On Mar 12, 2014, at 10:21 AM, Gow, Ian <igow at hbs.edu> wrote:

> 
> 
> On 2014-03-11, 12:40 PM, "Simon Urbanek" <simon.urbanek at r-project.org>
> wrote:
> 
>>> 
>> Today, you¹re much better off getting a server/workstation which you can
>> load with RAM and more cores for computing for the same price (running
>> Linux, obviously, you really don¹t want to do computing on
>> Windows with R)
> Running Linux ... or OS X.
> 
>> - and use your desktop/laptop just to access its computing power.
> OP mentioned RStudio. RStudio Server makes this very easy and pleasant to
> do (again this means Linux ... or OS X).
> 

Or RCloud, or OpenCPU, or X11, or VNC, or NX, or … :) Yes, pick the tool you like the best … there are many to chose from these days ...


>>> For some background - I have worked on Macs for years, but moved my
>>> main work desktop to Windows about 2 years ago.  I also do quite a bit
>>> of work in QIIME - which can be done on the mac (not the PC) and is both
>>> RAM and CPU intensive... so, I can benefit from multiple cores, large
>>> RAM, etc.  My 2011 MacBook Pro seems extremely sluggish at this point
>>> when running basic tasks (probably need to do a fresh OS install),
>> 
>> If you encounter sluggishness in OS X is pretty much always a disk issue.
>> Wipe the disk or even better put in a SSD - it¹s more than worth it - a
>> whole different world.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Simon
> -Ian
>