i5 vs. i7?
My old laptop is dying and I've started to look for a replacement. I am used to have an i7 processor, my dev env consists of either vagrant and a VM or a docker-compose env. Plus I use JetBrains IDE. Mostly I do webdev, so not that much compiling going on, however often I need a VM with Windows to have Photoshop or Illustrator running...

So I guess the question is: Is there a notable difference between an i5 and an i7 for development?

Probably doesn't matter, unless you've got huge compile times that are CPU bound (which tends to be rare these days.)

I run a desktop with a reasonably old i5 now, and it's fine for heavy development work & VMs when it's paired with 16GB RAM. (Not much these days but that was quite a bit when I built this box years ago.)

Running lots of VMs is really going to be impacted much more by being able to give them a decent slice of RAM rather than being able to have the edge in CPU speed.

That's what I was suspecting. A propper GPU would probably have a much bigger impact.

I kinda doubt it. For webdev, clockspeed shouldn't really matter, and for VM's I'd look at more RAM instead.. that is, if you're running many VM's of course. For a single VM, even 4GB of RAM on the host should do.. unless you're running Chrome, Firefox and Edge all at once of course. Those are way worse than VM's 🙃

Power consumption and generation matters more than what marketing wank they put on the box. So be sure to check some benchmarks before you buy.