I had the 2020 MBA i7 and just got it refunded to the credit card yesterday. I now have the 10th gen i7 mbp. No comparison for what I do. Regular surfing isn’t much of a difference but it’s 40% faster when doing raw file dslr exports than the MacBook Air. It’s able to maintain over 2 ghz under load with all 4 cores. The i7 mba is around 1.1-1.2 ghz instead. Remember the i7 is only 3-4% faster than the i5 in real life.
if you’re not going to stress the machine the mba is a fine machine for most people. But if you’re going to add the i7 you’re getting too close to mbp pricing to make it worthwhile. Even the base MacBook Pro will be faster except in gpu.
Ghz only upgrades within a processor group of the same generation with similar thermal envelope mainly benefits the seller, not you. If you need more processor power, you typically need more cores. There are some things that can't really benefit from parallelism due to inherent sequential dependencies or data access patterns. Even those benefit very little from fractional upgrades.
Ram can make a difference. Storage is good. Fractional ghz increments are a waste of money in virtually all cases.
Not a lot of talk about this, but I agree 100%. The taper at the front of the Air really sits a lot more nicely with the wrist than that square edge of the Pro.