I get asked questions:

Hi James - do you know how to get SAS loaded on an Apple MAC?

Please note that this only for Intel based Macintosh machines. If your machine is new within the last 5 or so years, it will be an Intel Mac. If you want to be sure you have an Intel, go to the Apple men and choose About This Mac and then look at the Processor line to see what you have.

Sadly, there is no native Macintosh SAS program since version 6.2. The only recourse you have are:

  1. Run SAS OnDemand for Academics
  2. Run SAS under an emulated Windows enviroment (Crossover Mac, unsuccessful)
  3. Run SAS under Windows via Apple's Boot Camp
  4. Run SAS under Windows in a Virtual Machine (VMWare, Parallels, VirtualBox)

SAS OnDemand is probably the simplest solution, but requires a high speed network connection.

Codeweavers Crossover Mac I couldn't get this to work, circa December 2012. However, a brave soul might take another crack at it with an updated version. download their trial software and see if SAS can be made to work.

The following solutions need a properly licensed copy of Windows. Windows isn't inexpensive, so shop around. Also, an Upgrade version will not work unless you have an old copy of Windows to "upgrade" from.

While the last two seem the same, they are not in that Boot Camp directly boots your Mac into Windows - you're not running Mac OS X at the same time. With version 3 of Boot Camp, you can access your files in either direction.

I haven't used Boot Camp, so the best I can do is refer you to this HowTo posted on iClarified.

Your remaining option is to run a virtual machine: VirtualBox (free), VMWare Fusion ($80), or Parallels ($80).

Download and install VirtualBox (free)

Download and install VMWare (you can try it for free).

Download and install Parallels (you can try it for free).

These products all do the same thing: emulate, by a program that runs under Mac OS X, a relatively simple Intel computer. It acts like a physical computer, so you can install an operating system and programs to that operating system.

At this point, you simply need to:

  1. Run the virtual machine software of your choice, and have it guide you
  2. Install Windows on that virtual machine
  3. Install SAS to Windows

While that sounds hard, it usually isn't. And If you set up file sharing and save your files to the Mac side, you can have access to your files even when the virtual machine isn't running.