Another dev who is very happy with the new machines, ordered one right away. In fact, I was very close to ordering a 12" MacBook, but the 13" was close enough, 1 port is a bit on the low side (4 USB-C is awesome, and I can't wait to get everything unified) and the TouchBar is quite intriguing.

I am personally appalled that 16GB could be considered too little memory for developer workloads (except for maybe some very specialised ones). While the Apple II with 48KB was a bit cramped, even an Amiga with 512k + 2MB RAMDisk was pretty decent, never mind the workstation-class NeXT cube with 16 or 32MB. (IIRC, developers at NeXT had 8MB machines, with compiles farmed out to servers, in order to "encourage" efficiency). I also developed significant Java server software on a 12" PowerBook G4.

Of course, the reality is that Xcode with clang/LLVM based tooling and its dictionary-based programming style sucks up RAM and CPU like you wouldn't believe, and various other decisions have been made in favour of recompiling/reindexing the world whenever possible. Swift takes that direction and dials it up to 11.

Anyone interested in more efficient dev tooling? Factor 10-100 improvements in performance are well within reach. Sub-second rebuild instead of minute+, MacBook/iPad plenty fast enough. etc.