Now I’m looking at MacBooks. I’m not overly familiar with their lines but I’m a bit concerned. The newer Pro with the M1 is capped at 16GB (my main machine has 64GB these days) and I’m a bit weary of an Arm processor in a product labeled “pro”. Most of the laptops I’ve seen with Arm processors are rather low end, maybe good lightweight, everyday use, but I would be weary to use them for development. The larger MacBook Pro seems not to have the memory limit and does not advertise the M1 (which for all I know could be fine), however the base price is much higher. From my understanding the Air is cheaper and smaller, but I don’t recall the specs or know if they would perform well for development.
Based on the reviews (like the black magic fuckary one from a few days ago), the RAM seems to be many times faster than comparable Intel models.
Since you'll be working with Apple applications and utilities (Xcode, Swift, etc), you'll be getting the speed improvements from basically day one.
I'm due for a new laptop in the next month (I need to use my yearly allowance before 31 Dec). I'm having a really hard time deciding between a 13" speced out Intel or M1. I focus mostly on web dev at the moment, so the choice is quite difficult based on the current reviews.