Dualbooting via bootcamp on a rMBP(GIS Use)

[ajumbaje]

So i will be starting a masters program in geography this fall and was wondering if any of you use you rMBP to run ArcGIS.

I was planning on getting the one with 16gb ram and 768gb ssd. would probably split it up 512/256.

Any of you running into any issues with graphics performance, etc? I dualbooted via bootcamp for a short while on my current laptop, and it worked fine. This was arcgis 9.3.1 and the screen is 1440 by 900.

Still might invest in a second screen.

What are your current setups? I am hoping to get a good 5 years out of this machine. One I have now(in sig) has lasted me 5 years and four months.

 

[alkalifly]

That setup will work fine; the boot camp graphics drivers will make sure it will work as well as it would on a wintel machine with the same specs.

ArcGIS also runs just fine in a virtual machine (I use Parallels, but I'm sure VMWare would work as well), with 16 GB of RAM on your host Mac, you will be able to allocate plenty to the VM. This has the advantage of maintaining access to all of your Mac programs and files.

Also, as an aside, there are several open-source GIS packages that run on a Mac (I've used GRASS and Quantum GIS). That said, the GIS world is so very Arc-centric, the Mac GIS programs sometimes feel like little more than a novelty. Everybody around you will be doing everything in Arc.

Maybe one day, ESRI will support Mac OS X natively; there has been a lot of grumbling about this for a long time, but they recently released a beta version of the ArcGIS Runtime SDK for OS X, so perhaps there will be some further developments soon.

 

[scbond]

I've had a quick run of ArcGIS installed via VMWare Fusion on a cMBP (2012) and had no issues with 4 and 8GB memory so you'll be fine. Obviously the more data you add in then the more memory will be used but I doubt you'll ever need 16GB for GIS in the near future. There are alternatives which can run natively on OS X should you feel Arc doesn't run too well but they aren't as good or nearly as familiar to use.

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Maybe one day, ESRI will support Mac OS X natively; there has been a lot of grumbling about this for a long time, but they recently released a beta version of the ArcGIS Runtime SDK for OS X, so perhaps there will be some further developments soon.

I'm very hopeful of this but I can't see it happening sadly.