Accounting work has a distinctive shape. Long stretches of numeric entry, a ledger open beside a scanned source document, client records that must not leave the practice unprotected, and days spent at a client's premises with no guarantee of a socket. Those four demands point at particular hardware more reliably than any processor tier does.

That means the choices worth arguing about are the keyboard and the chassis size that allows a full keypad, the display outputs that let two documents sit side by side, the Windows edition and the encryption it exposes, and battery behaviour away from a desk. Raw benchmark speed rarely decides whether a practice machine is pleasant to use.