45 security apps cut the ram and CPU performance in half out of the gate, then you have Win11 with its web gui and users who complain about any slowness so i7 or r7 is about the norm most places / bulk big 3 oems make for business.
personally I have an i7 in the lab that turned into a crawl on Youtube because they started sending VP9 video by default, but i7 doesn't have hardware decode for it. Got a plugin to force h264 (h264ify) and it's back to normal.
Then you have situations where a software update adds a CPU instruction dependency and straight up doesn't work anymore.
Had to install and force-retain an old version of Spotify client on a bench lab PC because the new versions require AVX-1/2. It's a streaming audio player...
