New Touchbar MBP - i7 worth it?

[grunty]

Been contemplating my next laptop for months (tried an iPad for travel and my 2014 -13” MBP for work.

I had been contemplating replacing the iPad with an 12” macbook or MacBook Air but I’ve decided it makes more sense to go all in on the 13” MacBook and consolidate down to one device in my bag.

2018 13” MBP is my next laptop - comfortable enough spending money on upgrading it to 16GB ram and 1TB SSD. I can’t decide / struggling to justify the extra money for the quad core i7 over the quad core i5...

Any advice? - should I just go all in given the money I’m spending anyway? is there a particular benefit to the i7 I’m missing (my usage is mostly development and testing on Virtual Machines)

 

[twanj]

Compiling stuff & VMs? Yes.

 

[cynics]

10% best case scenario in cherry picked task. If the task is graphics heavy don't expect noticeable (tangible) performance gains.

If processing power is a concern forgo an upgraded 13" and go for the base 15". You get more memory (16gb vs 8gb) standard and its clocked higher so you have better throughput (higher bandwidth) which can be beneficial for VM's (depending on what you are doing). The base model i5 is not only faster there is a dedicated GPU to offload what graphic work from the CPU so you can get a more noticeable gain in performance.

The second I decided to get the 13" I decided I was going "cheap" (something I wasn't nervous to carry around a lot in my bag) and small. So I have a 2018 13" TB MBP i5 8gb RAM 512gb SSD. I use it for work with an external monitor (dual screen retina + Dell 1080p) for lots of tabs (heavy tabs like fleet tracking), messages, FaceTime (phone calls), mail, iTunes, notes, reminders, etc all at the same time and its performance has been nothing short of impressive, far beyond my expectations. Memory hasn't been a problem with real world performance whatsoever however I notice it using swap files very often. Again NO noticeable degradation in performance however I would recommend 16gb RAM if you are particular in that case.

 

[maflynn]

I can’t decide / struggling to justify the extra money for the quad core i7 over the quad core i5

Your stated tasks would benefit from a quad core processor over the dual core. I'd say the upgrade to the TB based laptop is justified.