Mini PC Purchase

Agreed, my Mother had to get a new tv, recently, (Sony Bravia, 55 inch) and after the nightmare of finding a stand that doesn't need a long bench, and the other nightmare of hooking up her old equipment, it is now purring.

But the YouTube tv, channel is great, but also has annoying ad's, which your setup with a YT blocker app, should be able to get around.

It seems you have found a workaround for going down the Apple rabbit hole, good one, enjoy.

PS the only real peripheral update l am doing is trading in my Nintendo Lite for a Nintendo OLED Switch, (OLED screen is superior to the Lite and older Switch) with a bigger screen, (some adventure games text can be a nightmare on the Lite).

I am almost 80% across the board converted to mini's - I love them. The added benefit I have is more memory hog type stuff, i have on "servers" so it keeps everything quick.

You can do something as simple as putting a 4gb network hard drive on your router, and then access it from your mini in the living room, and if you say had one in the bedroom you could access the same files.

Quick question how do you like Windows 11 compared to Windows 10?

Interestingly enough both pc's use the same DDR4 Ram. When you get into processor specs and you read the amazon ad closely you see "3.6Ghz max turbo frequency" meaning it is overclocked

Get real specific in terms of the processor and you have to keep in mind the iterations of processors, in this case i3 to i5 the manufactures are indeed looking to increase speed, BUT they are also looking to increase specific need related functions. During the i3 to i5 switchover the biggest need of a processor at the time was the ability to stream music and video and better stream rates ( higher quality )

For the needs implied in this thread the i5 processor is simply a better processor more designed to meet the needs of video in particular. i7and i9 iterations have been developed to better perform with gaming.

When you look here:

i3: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php....00GHz&id=3333

i5: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php....50GHz&id=2627

comparing the 2 side by side as it were, and you could have the best between these 2 options, the i5 is a far better processor. The i5 7500 that comes in many of these mini computers is even better overall - but I didnt see any of those available.

Another tidbit that is interesting is the i3 chip is designed for laptops vs the i5 that is designed for desktops - and again this has to do with the processing power needed to light up a laptop screen vs a full monitor or in the case here a TV

"Newer" is not always better.

The other consideration here is "Warranty" with Tigerdirect..you really have a year, in my experience no questions asked... with Amazon resellers... eh not so much your not contacting a reseller 6 months after purchase and getting anything in terms of a warranty.

I run a number of machines with Pentium II processor that I use specifically for data crunching within Excel... blows the ever living snot out of the more modern processors in terms of integer and floating point math

And there is the issue of Windows 11 running on the i5 - it does, I have a few of these.

I purchased an i5 processor and everything works fine.