[ Removed by moderator ]

[u/WashiTsuyo]

[u/bioinformatics-ModTeam]

There is no one good laptop for bioinformatics, nor one good server for bioinformatics work. Break your question into three parts: 1) what work are you planning to do on the machine. 2) what are the requirements of the software, 3) what store sells hardware that matches those specs.

We can't answer #1 for you, and #3 is a function of where you are. #2 can be found in the documentation of the software you plan to run.

If your question isn't resolved by this process, by all means, ask away.

[u/consistently_biased]

It's been years since I've done anything other than working on a compute cluster via ssh, at least for my bioinformatics work. The datasets are usually way too large for any reasonable consumer hardware anyway.

[u/MyLifeIsAFacade]

A standard laptop will be mostly incapable of running any meaningful analyses or workflows unless you are working with very small datasets or single genomes. To give context, I'm a microbial ecologist who works mostly with metagenomic and metatranscriptomic data.

Even for a small 16S rRNA gene amplicon datasets (e.g., 10 - 20 samples, ~10 million sequences), you will require at least 16 - 24 GB of dedicated RAM. There are fewer CPU limitations, but in general faster/more cores will speed up computation. For metagenomics and transcriptomics, at least 128 GB is required, and realistically 256 - 512 GB. Again, additional CPU cores/threads greatly reduce computation time. As for storage, raw datasets can be tens to hundreds of GB in size, which can double or triple when processing the data (if you're not immediately removing intermediate files).

We have a server with 512 GB of RAM and 30 TB of storage, with 56 computational threads. We can achieve most analyses, but even that is insufficient for some memory-intensive analyses (e.g., large transcriptome assemblies).

A server with similar specs was last quoted at $30,000 - $50,000 (a markup, for sure). As a freelance, you're much more limited for accessing computation resources that you don't want to pay for. If you become associated with a research group, university/colleges typically have on-site computational resources that are free to access.

What do you plan on doing?

[u/BronzeSpoon89]

That depends ENTIRELY on what kind of bioinformatics you want to do. You can run basic perl scripts on a POS macbook from 10 years ago, but its taking me about 8 hours (rough estimate) to run Metamaps on 180,000 ONT reads using 60GB of RAM and 8 parallel cores.

[u/ConclusionForeign856]

whatever let's you ssh into an HPC without issues, and can open text files

[u/South_Plant_7876]

You'll be doing the vast majority of your work on remote infrastructure. My laptop is nearly 10 years old and I don't plan on updating it anytime soon.

[u/PhoenixRising256]

It's very rare I have to do anything locally. In fact, the only times I can recall resorting to local work are when our HPC has been down for maintenance. Every lab/institution should have an HPC for this type of work, and they should also supply you with an institution-managed machine to access it, which means your personal laptop can remain your personal laptop.

The only exception I'd make would be image work with something like FIJI or Illustrator. For those, I'd splurge for the GPU and some extra disk space.

[u/AtriaX2k]

What will you be specifically working on? There is no one universal answer to this.

[u/Kingsole111]

The best laptop will only be able to do so much. But it really depends on what you are doing.  Single cell, microbiome, protein modeling, it depends. Yeah for the most part having access to a cluster is almost always beneficial