The entry level board is priced fairly competitively.

And there is no shitfuckery about making it effectively non-functional with RAM/storage limitations, Apple style. You can basically plug and play, aside from the BGA CPU.

And very honestly, that entry-level i-5 CPU is more than enough for office tasks and interneting. If you are looking to do much more than that you are frankly looking at the wrong product, regardless of which CPU variant you pick. If that's you, you have two options: 1. just get a proper desktop PC (will be more modular then this anyhow), or 2. just offload that CPU heavy work to a work server. A lot of people are suddenly realizing, with Coronavirus and all, how damned easy it is just to offload all their processing to a remote server. 4 cores is honestly more than enough for what effectively just becomes a thin client in that context.