There are tons and tons of websites where you can create an account with just your email. I wouldn’t expect a third party account to be mandatory. Specially from a product like this one.

Maybe this is a pet peeve but it’s a vpn tool that forces you to log in with an “identity provider”. Yeah, no thanks.

I would hope 16C/32T CPU from 2017 could handle software transcoding

I didn’t say it couldn’t handle it. Just that it was very inefficient.

peak power consumption while playing a movie does not really matter compared to idle power consumption

I mentioned both things. Did you actually read my comments?

I think it’s a point of a interest for any hw running 24/7 but you do you.

Regarding transcoding, are you saying you’re not even doing it? If you are, doing it with your cpu is far more inefficient than using a gpu. But again, different strokes I guess.

Isn’t ryzen not recommended for transcoding? Plus, I’ve read that power efficiency isn’t great. Mostly regarding idle power consumption.

No. You can’t game on it meaning that the games do not even launch.

I don’t think your experience is representative of a generic user. This video from Level1Techs paints a completely different picture. Gaming for example, is pretty much out of the picture in the ARM version of Windows.

Does it? All of the “windows on arm” video I’ve seen say that tons of things are broken.