I use an M3 air for my personal machine which is used for c++ development and music production — it’s an excellent machine and I have yet to encounter a task that would require a MPB (at least for the type of work I am involved with).

Thanks. How much memory does it have? I figured 16 GB might be a bit in the low end for XCode, the emulator, some other random software and a lot of Firefox tabs.

Will you be running a lot of containers for dev environment or background services?

I don't think so. I'll probably write some MacOS system software, like probing their battery APIs and such, but they are going to be small.

I'm not exactly sure how I'd proceed to learn the MacOS/iOS internals, I'll have to look into it, but I don't think I need to run a VM, unless I hack the XNU kernel? QEMU does run on MacOS so I guess that's additional 4GB - 6GB of memory for the kernel?

I dunno about lying; it used to be true in the Intel age so it might simply be a matter of their information being out of date.

Thanks, I'll do more research. This is becoming temping as Air is affordable so will attract less negative energy from *wife.