I am Ziyan Junaideen. I am a Ruby developer with ten years of experience building and maintaining complex Ruby applications, including payment gateways, SaaS applications and e-commerce stores. Over the years, I have come across the question, "is an 8GB 13in MacBook Pro/Air sufficient for Ruby development?"

The answer is yes, and I use an 8GB 13" M1 MacBook Pro, which has served me well so far. I wish the screen were a tad larger, but I enjoy the compactness of a 13" frame.

Ruby & Rails support

Ruby and Rails support are as smooth as it can be. I use Native (ARM64) versions instead of X64 versions of applications running through Rosetta. Ruby and Apple Silicone couple up smoothly. I use ASDF as the package manager. If you have issues, I would recommend giving it a try.

The good

• The keyboard is great (vs the butterfly)
• Love that the fans hardly kick in
• It is almost always cool to the touch
• Its compact and potable (not as much as an Air)
• I have run the whole day without needing to charge and battery to spare
• Sound quality is pretty good too

The bad

• 2 inches of extra screen real estate would be great (split screen editor)
• It only has 2 USB-C ports (my headset is USB-A)

Memory pressure

Let me be honest. 8GB is barely sufficient RAM. I got this device from the company I work from. I would prefer at least 16GB. That said, given that the SSDs are fast enough, you should be able to use demanding applications (even like Adobe products). But at this memory limitation, I would use minimal applications.

I usually only keep the following open while having a rails console and ./bin/dev (Rails server, Resque and other related services) running and still having memory pressure in the green zone.:

• Editor (neoVIM and VSCode)
• Browser (Safari) and OpenVPN client
• Drata / Slack / Notion / Grammarly

When memory pressure increases, the OS will be using the Swap. Meaning it will write contents from memory to the SSD. This is not good as SSDs have limited write cycles, and using it as a swap increases the likelihood of bad sectors and, ultimately, disk failure.

Conclusion

A MacBook with 8GB of RAM is sufficient for my work which centres around Ruby, Elixir, and Node JS (I also do Swift UI and Flutter but am yet to use them in my MBP). However, should I ever need it,I have a 27" Core i9 9900KF Intel iMac with 64GB of RAM.

I recommend a developer go for a minimum of 16GB and 500GB SSD/HDD. You can never really complain about having too much RAM. I recommend you choose 24GB or 32GB if it is your only machine. That said, you go a lot of distance with an 8GB MBP.