He merely reverted back to his prior opinion, or perhaps a bit more lax with the allowance of an i5. Also, the G1610 was not good enough for him, although his actual rationale needs independent reproduction.
Production quality stuff means getting things done quickly. Computing will always run amuck of tasks that take too long, such as Windows Update, scanning a drive for malware, or imaging a drive and people are too accepting of slow and don't know why that IPad Air 2 is so snappy while that old CPU+HDD combo drags them down.
The absolute pinnacle basic box would cost around $1300, and that is by go all out, with i7s, higher end mobos,, M2 SSD, 32 GBs of RAM. It is easy to get around $850-900 for a premium browsing box that doesn't give the user the inclination to upgrade. Throw in some real nice monitors and something Dragon Naturally speaking and luxury computing would be a compelling buy. And the margins between the low end and high end.for computers is smaller than say, tools or car. The very many power hungry old tech means that it will eventually hit the pocketbook more than the new, faster computer if you keep it long enough.
Yes, I'm starting to be able to perceive the difference in performance, somewhat, between my OCed 3.15Ghz FM1 rig, and my i3-6100 (3.7Ghz, stock) rig.
The i3-6100 is basically pretty snappy, nearly as snappy as my G4400 OCed to 4.455, even when crunching four instances of NumberFields@Home in BOINC on the i3. (100% CPU usage.)
Even the performance difference between the Haswell G1820 2.7Ghz dual-core Celeron, and the i3-6100, is pretty subtle though, as long as both rigs have adequate RAM (8GB), and a modern SSD. Especially when both are using the same internet connection.
This is, of course, helped by the fact that more recent versions of Firefox, seem to have removed the "CPU spike" issue, when switching tabs or opening new tabs, such that the performance of the underlying hardware can show through.
So I can see why escrow4 prefers the i5 for browsing. I don't really feel I need a quad-core, with Firefox, unless I was into watching 4K videos, but I can understanding wanting maximum performance for a task.
Edit: And if one prefers using Chrome as their browser, then I can more easily see the "need" for an i5 quad-core CPU, since Chrome is much more multi-threaded than Firefox is.
Edit: Referring to the quoted bold part - yes, I find that many people are far too "accepting of slow". Hence the proliferation of Atom-based laptops / netbooks and tablets. (Of course, price and battery life factors into that strongly as well.)
But I've also seen people with P4 desktops, that keep on running them. For whatever reason, they just don't care to get anything more modern. Even though I try to convince them that the newer stuff is better. (Ok, this person has a Win7 desktop, with I think an Ivy Bridge dual-core Pentium or somesuch. So they're not totally living in the past. But they still hang onto the P4. Even though I gifted them a Core2-era machine with Win7 on it.)