I wonder if that’s overthinking it.

I am afraid that is correct.

Buy whatever that fits your budget and serves your immediate analysis needs. Laptops are "disposable" over long term as they will get outdated. So this is not a "forever" kind of investment.

A laptop (even with 24G of RAM) is of limited use to analyze large datasets, for which you will end up using institutional/cloud resources, So in some sense the laptop is an "appliance" that you use to run "terminal" program to connect to central compute resources.

MacBook Air is going to run the programs at a slower pace (commensurate with CPU spec and will have a slightly inferior screen compared to Pro) but otherwise it will have identical functionality. If money is not a consideration then buy the Pro otherwise save your cash and get a MacBook Air.

Between the Air and Pro, it makes virtually zero difference in terms of how it affects your bioinformatics work. Like others said, most work will be on a cluster anyway using 128 GB ram that any commercial Macbook won't even touch anywhere close to. Between Macbooks or any laptop for work, I would choose the Framework with Linux as someone else suggested because I have a massive list of things wrong with the macOS that I've accumulated over my years of using my Macbook. If you want long term use, the choice between a Macbook and Framework is clear cut. The modular nature of the Framework will let you keep it up to date for a ridiculously long amount of time, if not the rest of your career.

Using Surface pro and the go version. I rarely run scripts locally, I use any provided cluster for me. If you have an access to clusters or other possible resources then just go for Air.

May be i can also add my 2 cents.

It will totally depend on what type or work you want to run on the said Macbook Air/Pro. Like everyone suggested, if you have access to Institute HPC then even a macbook Air would be good. You can choode any you like. Air being lighweight on your shoulders. If you are thinking of running all analysis locally, then My personal choice would be to buy a resources heavy laptop like a Gaming laptop. It will give you good resources alteast if you are working with Small data like bacterial stuff. Going into teritory of Plants/Mammals will require alot more resources specifically RAM as datasets will be big and that consants Load on CPU/RAM and SSD will have some effect on life of product. So again in that case, a good Gaming laptop will be a good choice. Even if you want to run windows and Terminal as WSL2.

I know your choice is mainly between the Air and the Pro but like others have said, if you're not totally locked in the Mac ecosystem, going for a (gaming) PC/laptop can give you really good specs for a comparable price and some added flexibility.

I dual boot Windows and Linux and the latter is where I do most analyses. My RAM is 32GB but I dedicated a ~300GB partition on an SSD as swap space which gives me a lot of total memory to run heavy workloads locally. Swapping on an HDD would not be practical but SSD speeds makes this perfectly useful. This may not the most ideal setup for the SSD longevity but I have an older 2TB one that I stuck into my current laptop that has been working great like this for several years.

At our university, our cluster's job queue gets crazy long quite often so using it for only the heaviest workloads while being able to do less heavy analyses locally is nice.

I've never used an Air, always been a Pro person. But then I also have a lot of local work, like heavy lifting with R, running a Parallels VM, heavy SQL work, local web-hosting + testing (more often than not, two or more of them at the same time). Pro makes sense for me: I've used the same M1 Pro since 2021, and it still works like new.

Your purchase depends on your use case. If you just wish to connect to a server and run all your work there, any laptop (even a chromebook) or a Surface or an iPad Pro will do. If you do need some heavy lifting by the laptop, focus more on RAM first, then look into how much CPU you need. If you're going to be buying your own laptop, think really hard before going in for a Pro. Worst case scenario, you trade your laptop in for a different model.