I have a different perspective. I do all my development remotely if I can now in cloud VMs. I know that doesn’t apply to some classes of development but it’s a hell of a lot less painful isolating it and having snapshots available when inevitably you break something. The amount of hours I’ve lost due to an OS upgrade or dev tool chain upgrade breaking each other is huge so I keep them well apart.
Thus I’ve been using an 8gb M1 Mac mini doing this for a week now and haven’t had any problems. It makes a very nice terminal computer with luxury desktop. When a suitable 27” approx iMac appears with an M-series CPU in it, I will buy one. It’s nice being able to triple swipe between a Mac desktop with native apps, a desktop full of terminals to Linux VMs and a windows desktop machine via RDP transparently!
It’s not really because the hardware is quieter, faster and cooler than the old i3 Mac mini I was using. That has a direct benefit to the end user, not just on sheer local grunt. On the dev front it means it gets out of your way and stays out of your way.
Thus I’ve been using an 8gb M1 Mac mini doing this for a week now and haven’t had any problems. It makes a very nice terminal computer with luxury desktop. When a suitable 27” approx iMac appears with an M-series CPU in it, I will buy one. It’s nice being able to triple swipe between a Mac desktop with native apps, a desktop full of terminals to Linux VMs and a windows desktop machine via RDP transparently!