If you can, get a amazon fire tv stick or box from the USA. It has the best processor, and has a great platform. Install kodi yourself on there. It is a lot easier than you think.
The people named can totally sell legally fully loaded boxesdo a little more research a lot of the companies named were selling pre loaded box's and can not now do that or even offer service or tech help on said box's anyone with some tech skills can download kodi to their laptop and are away to the races but for a lot of folks a pre loaded box is all they can manage and right now it is not so easy to get one.... not impossible but harder than before
The latest release requires Android 4.2 so your 4.4 is fine as of this yearOne of my boxes has 4.4 kitkat and it won't support higher versions. That means you won't be able to install higher versions of Kodi, which means you won't be able to get some sites that provide excellent streaming. If you buy a box it should have minimum lollipop 5.1 (may be good for a year) Marshmellow is out 6.0...Nougat 7.0 should be out too.
Where you're getting this info, everywhere I look its saying 5 is the minimum requirement. The manufacture says it needs 5 but have provided a fork version 17. These guys are saying even the standard ram is not enough.The latest release requires Android 4.2 so your 4.4 is fine as of this year
The FUTURE release requires Android 5.0
Release candidate 4 is out so it should come soon but as of today it is not official
Everywhere???Where you're getting this info, everywhere I look its saying 5 is the minimum requirement.
According to the Kodi website it says it requires that you have V5.0 to install the latest version of Kodi. You said: "The latest release requires Android 4.2 so your 4.4 is fine as of this year". The latest version is 17.Everywhere???
Um this might be a bit too obvious and I am missing the trick here but
If I want to look at minimum requirements to run Kodi then I go to Kodi's website.... ???
WTF is "wireshack.org" and why would you use them as your reference link???
Either way the Android 4.2 minimum has been around a LONG time (since Kodi 13 I think?)
So 2 to 3 years of support (after that time I don't care how much you paid for a premium box, it is still a computer and still obsolete)
Your original post was about how a cheap box lasts a year and high end box is future proof (anyone who has ever run an Android phone can tell you how false that was)