How many gigabytes of RAM do you need for development?

Not much.

Unless maybe you are going to try to do something complicated with virtual machines, or you need to use e.g. video editing tools, or something.

I bought the 16 GB M1 mini, but Xcode doesn't use much of that. Most of the 16 GB is used up by memory leaks in system services.

Any good Engineer will tell you the super unsatisfying answer: "It Depends".

Getting started with python scripting and other simple coding languages like that? 8GB can be fine.

For iOS I find that I'm okay with 16GB. I see developers I follow on Twitter struggling with 16GB and 32GB when they're running one of every kind of simulator at the same time.

There is likely some sort of AR/VR development kit on the horizon, and this may be more demanding than traditional iOS/Mac development. We won't know any details about that until Apple wants us to, though.

Another thing to consider is the type of code you’re building. For example, building large C++ projects is notoriously memory hungry.

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Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
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I have a M1 Max MBP with 32GB of RAM as my main dev machine. Mainly C++ and Swift code and the simulator.