I developed my first few iOS apps on a 2013 MacBook Air with 4 gigs of ram. On larger projects (especially Swift) the builds could be a bit slow and the syntax

I developed my first few iOS apps on a 2013 MacBook Air with 4 gigs of ram. On larger projects (especially Swift) the builds could be a bit slow and the syntax highlighting would be delayed, but overall it was totally manageable. When I upgraded to a 16gig Mac book pro, I thought it would be a game changer to speed up the builds. To my surprise, they weren't really that much faster. It seems like the slowness of XCode and Swift isn't constrained by resources - its just slow no matter how much power you throw at it. So I would say for getting into iOS and Xcode development these new Macbook Airs would be more than enough and a used older Air would suffice.