I ended up with two Android boxes on the same shelf entirely by accident. The first one was a present from my brother, who upgraded and passed his old one down. The second I bought myself about eight months later because the first had started to feel sluggish and I assumed it was dying.
Rather than throw the old one out I left them both plugged in, one on HDMI 1 and one on HDMI 2, and for about six weeks I used whichever one I happened to pick up the remote for. That accidental experiment taught me more than any review I read beforehand.
The older box was not dying. It was fine for anything I watched in the afternoon. Where it fell apart was live sport in the evening, and specifically the first ninety seconds after switching channels, where it would sit and think while the newer one had already started playing.
The difference was not the processor, or at least not mainly. The older box had 2GB of memory and the newer one has 4GB, and when you have a player app, a guide loading in the background and whatever the box itself is doing, 2GB runs out. You can see it happen — the box does not crash, it just gets slower and slower over an evening until you restart it and it is fine again for a few hours.
That restart pattern is the tell. If your box is quick in the morning and sluggish by ten at night, it is running out of memory, not power.
Storage was the other one nobody mentions. The old box had 8GB, and once the operating system and three apps were on it there was almost nothing left, which meant it could not cache anything ahead of what I was watching.
I wish I had known both of those before buying, because the specification I would have looked for is completely different to what I actually compared. This breakdown of what to look for in an Android box puts memory and storage where they belong rather than leading with processor speeds nobody can interpret.
For context, most of these run some version of Android TV, so the same rules about background apps eating memory apply exactly as they do on a phone.
The old box is now in the spare room and perfectly happy. It was never broken. It was just asked to do too much.