Phil Cook wrote:

> Succinctly put thank you. The whole thing is why hasn't the 
> slot-together style reached down into the standard market, and if it did 
> how would that affect 'normal' users' computer buying patterns. Instead 
> of buying an entire new computer would they instead opt to upgrade the 
> old one because it's a piece of cake to do.

Currently manufacturers assume that the only reason you could want to be 
able to replace parts "easily" is because you need to do it fast, and if 
you need to do it fast it must be because you have a "high availability" 
setup. And if that's the case, the cost of downtime dwarfs any hardware 
price you can come up with. These types of people will pay through the 
nose to avoid downtime - and so that's what gets charged.

In fairness, it's much harder to design hardware this way. Current 
hardware is "easy enough" that most people can manage it, and there's no 
real large pressure for that to change.

> I mean seriously I've listened to friends talking about upgrading their 
> entire computer to get more speed out of a game or something when all 
> they need to do is switch the video card (or *to* a video card rather 
> then the MB GPU). To them the computer is a lump like a television, 
> opening the case doesn't occur to them and I don't think they'd be 
> enthused by what they'd find if they did.

Heh. I bet the hardware guys would want to prevent that. ;-)



In fairness, if you want to replace the CPU, you will probably end up 
having to replace virtually the entire PC anyway.

(You'll almost certainly need a new motherboard and new RAM. And 
replacing a motherboard is currently *hard*. So many things to 
disconnect and reconnect. I especially enjoy playing with the header 
pins for the front plate...)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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