A good summary (with pictures) by a reddit user: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6bjvy6/amd_2017_financ...
I have met software engineers who could not believe me when I pointed out that multi-threading was invented, made sense, and, in fact, was thriving - on single-core computers (with no hyper-threading)!
If I have an IDE, 2-3 VM's, a couple of browsers, continuous integration running in the background, webpack/ts-loader with off thread hinting I can easily have 4-5 processes running that all benefit from having a full core to play with.
It's for that reason when I had to build a new desktop for the new job I went with the Ryzen 1700, each core isn't that important (as long as it's comparable with the core in my current jobs i5-3570K which it broadly is), it's having eight of them.
For developers I think more cores is still better (I'd add Spotify and Slack to your list of things that are always running) and yet we still prefer shiny laptops to powerful desktops.
Laptops have horrible postural positions unless you use desktop monitors at which point why not just use an actual desktop which will annihilate the laptop on performance anyway.
My laptop gets switched on maybe once a month.