Get 16GB for coding.

I would not get 8GB for serious coding work. Not unless your projects are tiny or you enjoy watching the beach ball spin.

The M-series MacBook Air is a beast for the price. The chip itself handles compiling surprisingly well. But RAM is the bottleneck. Once you’re running a couple of Docker containers, a browser with 20 tabs, VS Code, and a compiler hitting your codebase, 8GB gets swamped fast. You’ll start hitting swap, which slows everything down and wears the SSD over time.

16GB is the sweet spot. It handles large Xcode or Android Studio builds, multiple virtual environments, and the usual chaos of daily dev work without breaking a sweat. You can’t upgrade later, so the extra $200 now saves you from trading it in a year.

Future You deserves better than a laptop that stalls on a build.