I use an 2016 Macbook i7/8GB as my daily development system. I love it. It's light and portable, which is important for me.
The main thing to understand about these machines is that the i7 CPUs are about as good as any other CPU on the market (aside from less cores), but they're fanless which means they rely on the case to dissipate heat, and so will thermally throttle during long-running high CPU jobs. They're perfect for short lived jobs, even multi-minute compilations, but will have a hard time getting through repeated long jobs that require long durations of high CPU.In short, great for bursty computations with longer idle times where the laptop has a chance to cool off.
For instance, I build brew packages, full llvm builds, even small ML models, etc, without problems, because the machine starts cold and there is enough time after the job is done for the machine to cool off again. My machine suffers on tasks like Docker+Kubernetes/minikube that run a constantly polling VM in the background that takes 25-100% CPU when running idle.
For instance, someone in this thread mentioned the iOS emulator might be difficult to run. This may not be true, so long as the emulator does not constantly use lots of CPU - if it just uses high CPU in response to input events, it will likely be fine.