Hi,

I am looking into a new laptop, which will be used for sequencing analysis, and I'm trying to decide between the 13" and 15" macbook pro. I have a cluster for the heavy lifting of mapping and counting reads. However, it is often easier to explore the data, make plots, or work without internet while commuting on my laptop. Is most of bioconductor multithreaded? Will dual core vs quad core make much of a difference for rna-seq analysis, getting sequences in genomicRanges, etc? What about moving forward with many more samples and single cell rna-seq? Similarly, would 8gb vs 16gb of ram make any difference?

Thanks for any advice.

If you can afford it, I'd max out everything then I'd drop the specs down in the following order:

• Go from 15" to 13" (I prefer 13" anyway, as I'm usually plugged into an external monitor when at a desk)
• Go from 4 cores to 2 cores
• Go from 16gb to 8gb

What I mean to say is that in my opinion, you will get the most bang for you buck (ie. you'll be frustrated less) if you prioritize maxing out on your RAM

You didn't mention HD size -- obviously I'd go for as large of HD space as possible, but if forced to pick more HD or more RAM, I'd probably go for more RAM.

Having to do spring cleaning on your HD due to running out of space can be a huge PITA, but probably something that only happens every so often, however if the work you do is RAM heavy (or perhaps you are working on more than one thing at once), running out of RAM could be a daily pain.

All this having been said, I currently do lots of work on an 8gb / 256GB SSD 13" macbook pro. Sometimes the 8gb limit bites, but currently my HD space is super low and need to figure out which projects I can clean off of the computer, which is not something I'm looking forward to.