> Anecdote: a family member and software dev just bought the latest macbook pro coming from about an 8 year old macbook pro. Apparently he doesn't perceive much real world performance difference between the 2 machines. He said single core synthetic benchmarks were higher, but not by much.

I just upgraded my 13" MBP from a 2017 i7 to the 2020 i7.

Single core benchmarks are basically the same but it's also running at 2/3 the clock speed, so much cooler. Plus two additional cores.