CPU comparison, MBA 2011 vs 2013

Still hard to get conclusive reports on the i7. But early indicators have it as anywhere from 10% to 30% faster in various tasks. The base clock jump from 1.3 to 1.7 is quite a substantial leap, but both chips are bound by the same TDP (draw the same power).

 

Apple folks that I have talked to have said the i7 machines get the same battery life. They could be wrong, of course, but that seems to be generally be what I'm hearing.

 

The i5 will perform just fine for what you're doing. I did the same stuff with a Sandy Bridge i5 and the Haswell is a huge step up from that, even at a lower base frequency. It will turbo boost to handle the more intensive tasks. You may not even notice a meaningful difference doing mundane tasks in those programs with the i7. I opted for the i5/8gb.