2017 Macbook: i5 vs i7

[mrmister]

Looking at refurbs and clearance, is the i7 worth it? I thought I'd read in one of these many threads that testing revealed the i7 ate more battery and made it run hotter, which ultimately outweighed extra processing power.

Can anyone who knows chime in?

 

[EugW]

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...uns-of-cinebench.2073415/page-2#post-25271927

 

[Neodym]

Depends on your workflow. Under sustained load, the i7 may indeed get into troubles, but for light work with the occasional load spike, the i7 should be quite a bit better.

And to my knowledge it is still unclear why the 2017 m3 is noticeably slower in SSD access under FileVault than a 2015 m5. Could be the SSD size or something in the CPU.