Hi again Eco-Enthusiasts, I received a huuuge* list of responses from all of you regarding advice for a personal laptop, and I'm very grateful. I wanted to write out a quick summary in case any other incoming grads or near-future grads were wondering any of the same questions.
Firstly, check with your program to see whether or not your lab and affiliated other labs are Mac People or PC People. Compatibility issues can be a huge pain, and lose you an awful lot of time and, so you don't want to be the odd one out in your group. It turns out that my future lab at Harvard is not only composed of Mac people, and I also learned that they will provide me with a Mac desktop(!). So for me, Mac became an obvious choice. HOWEVER, if I knew I was going to be doing a lot of Arc-Gis, the consensus from the crowd is that a PC desktop is pretty much necessary for running that program in heavy doses. There are ways to run Arc-Gis on a Mac through the Windows environment, which one person warned is very slow. Half a dozen people commented that, depending on the scope of your analysis, running Arc-Gis through Windows on a PC with ample space is critical. Other reasons NOT to get a Mac, which may apply to some people: It can be hard to get Macs to run certain types of stats packages, such as for Bayesian models, WinRhizo, or multivariate stats. The battery life is also not spectacular, but there are ways to get around that for field work if you invest up front. Several people suggested that one can save money by purchasing refurbished laptops. The most common non-Mac computer recommended was a Toshiba Satellite (which is what I had through undergrad. It did serve me well). Others include the Lenovo Thinkpads and the Dell Latitude EGH20. Overall, I received almost twice as many recommendations for Apple over other computer types, but I recognize that I seeded the question with my preference so it's not a completely fair survey. Both the Macbook Pro and Air were popular, and the Air was voted especially great for field work because of its lightness and longer battery life. The Pro has more space, however. Other benefits of a Mac: Timeline is great for automatically backing up all of your files. The hardware and software is especially attuned. They're sturdy and last forever (I write from my ancient Powerbook G4 that has served me well for years and done field work in several countries). The other especially neat thing about Macs is their ability to sync with tablets - several people recommended this as a way to be even more productive. One person even suggested using a tablet over a laptop! Advice on citation programs was significantly less unanimous: Papers, Zotero, and Mendeley all received several votes. Zotero might have more in the way of community support, though, which will likely induce me to look into it further. Papers costs money, but that comes with the assurance that it will be updated as your device receives new builds. I've used Mendeley to organize journal articles, but I'm told the citation requires more manual editing than Zotero. It does work very smoothly over-all, though. One last thing! A few different people also recommended having multiple hard-drives, for both backing everything up and holding lots of data for work like Arc-Gis. Alright - I think I've summed it all up. Thanks again to everyone for all their heart-felt advice! Cheers, Cat * Over two dozen.
