What sort of thing are you going to develop (don't have to post here, but you should think about it)? That's as much a factor in what sort of Mac you get as the coding part. Any new Mac is more than enough for
learning coding these days - you could do that on the base MacBook Air. So (i guess, no experience) any serious LLM coding will benefit from tons of RAM and storage...
Otherwise, in general, The current 16GB base RAM for Macs is still ridiculously mean but will
probably be adequate unless you have special requirements - and the 24GB on the M4 Pro shoud
probably be plenty. Of course, in 2025 it should be a no-brainer to get 64GB+ of RAM to cross off that "probably", but unfortunately Apple want 4 times the going rate for RAM upgrades - so, either (a) risk it, (b) spend the money or (c) get a Linux PC.
One thing that can be very useful for development is using virtual machines to test code and/or run servers in controlled environments. A base Mac can easily spin up a minimal, single-processor, 1GB RAM Linux VM to run a web server using something like
Multipass but if you need VMs with more processing and graphics, maybe running Windows or MacOS then more than the base 16GB RAM would be a good idea.
Fully agree that 256GB storage is a joke if you're going to be installing any other "pro" applications (like: XCode) or using VMs. That's partly because the OS and installed apps will eat a substantial chunk of the 256GB - so even 512GB will be a big improvement in terms of usable space. Plus
you really don't want your system drive to get anywhere close to being full - or it will start clobbering performance. I've found 1TB (which - again - would be the minimum for a $1500 laptop from anybody but Apple) goes a long way (but I'm not doing 4k+ video or Big Data).
Are you actually going to work "on the road" or will you mostly be using the MBP on a desktop? For desktop use, I wouldn't be tempted beyond 1TB of Apples's super-expensive storage & even 512GB would probably be enough when you could add extra fast external storage at a fraction of Apple's price. If you
are going to work on the road then there is obviously an attraction to having all of your data "internal".
Also consider screen "real estate" - your 24" iMac has a lot and a 14" MBP is going to seem like a downgrade. So think about a large monitor for use on the desktop (or two - having multiple displays can be great for coding).
