Suggested New Mac for Heavy R Use

Today, you?re 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 don?t want to do computing on
Windows with R)

- and use your desktop/laptop just to access its computing power.

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 - it?s more than worth it - a
whole different world.

Cheers,
Simon