Hi Vania,

I think we'll need more information. What kind of processing, specifically, would you like this laptop to handle? Is there a reason why you want a Mac specifically? Is there a reason why it has to be a laptop?

I tend to use my Mac Air as a terminal interface to more powerful computers. It's plenty powerful to display solutions and do a bit of figure development, but I wouldn't make a laptop a cornerstone of an analysis pipeline. You can get a lot more power a lot more affordably in a desktop workstation. In the best case scenario, there may be communal computational resources that have linux and whatever tools you need installed where you can just send your images to be processed and you don't have to tie up any of your laptops or workstations with it at all. Buying space and time on a community resource might also get you managed backups, and facilitate collaboration. I cannot speak for your computational environment, but it would be worth thinking about how you want your work to scale up---I really wouldn't advise banking on doing lots of analysis on a laptop if that is not an essential requirement.

Tools like Freesurfer, FSL, AFNI, and others are developed on Linux, and so you might have the easiest time running them on a system that does also. System76 sells and supports laptops that run Linux natively, in case that's of interest to you. If you were going with a Mac just because it has the terminal, I'll also mention that you can install Linux within Windows 10 (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/command...), which might give you an even more compatible environment than the Mac terminal.

In my opinion, the value of a laptop is being able to pick it up and take it with you. If it's in the middle of crunching a bunch of numbers, then it has to stay put until it's done. If you have a computer that's whole purpose is to sit there and crunch numbers while you keep your laptop on hand for more agile work... that's just my two cents anyway.