16 vs 13-inch MacBook Pro for Node.js Development

Hi everyone!

I’m using a MacBook Air (2013) with i5-4250U and want to update to some newer model. The main goal is to decrease server restart time of a big Node.js project and decrease time of TypeScript compilation. Currently it takes about 8 and 25 second respectively. As projects growing it starting really bothers me.

I’m choosing between:

• 13-inch 2020 with 4-cores i5-1038NG7
• 16-inch 2019 with 6 cores i7-9750H

The question is: is it worth to spend +600$ more for additional 2 cores?

The benchmarks shows that the i7-9750H up to 35% faster in multicore benchmarks, but in single-core the 1038NG7 can be even a bit faster. Also 9750H has 2 times bigger L3 cache.

RAM and storage are the same, but the 13-inch model has faster memory: 3733MHz vs 2666MHz.

80% of the time I use an external monitor, so screen size is not a dealbreaker for me.