Hopefully others will chime in, esp. since my favorite Mac OS is called "Ubuntu 16.04"*...
My laptop has 7.5GB of memory, and that is fine for Bootcamping. I do process a fair number of test data sets and the like on it, occasionally something like 3dQwarp on it (but rarely that large a program) and it is OK, but still pretty slow. For major processing (i.e., a group study), I would not use a laptop anyways.
You would probably want as good a graphics card as you can get, and HD screen resolution (my laptop is 2048x1152).
More/faster processors are good, esp. for parallelized things: I have 4x2.30GHz.
I have a 256 GB disk and that is handy for not worrying much about space while saving dsets; 128 GB is also fine-- again, I wouldn't process a group study on my laptop. Also, I assume most laptops are only 64-bit now, but yes, 64-bit.
--pt
*personal opinion only!
