PC's: Why do we put up with poor design?

[R8pilot]

Dare-devil that I am, I did a routine OS update today. Oh dear, what will go wrong this time?

Want to unplug that card? Reach into a pitch-black canyon, too narrow for your piano-virtuoso fingers. Now peer into the slot with a flashlight in one hand and a screwdriver in the other, trying to press on a tiny piece of plastic that will probably just bend instead of unlocking the card. Oh, and disconnect 3+ power cables and so on, too.

Swap the power supply and/or its cables? Disconnect, extract and swap a dozen cables through multiple paths while dodging sharp metal panels.

Swap the SSD? Oh, no, you dropped that absurdly-tiny screw into a black hole!

Why do we put up with such awful, ad-hoc design disasters?

 

[Deleted member 197115]

Power cables routing is the worst offender, especially when your GPU alone needs 3.
But what option do we have except becoming console peasants?

 

[blekenbleu]

Lesson learned: eventually nearly everything in a PC will get upgraded,
so start with a roomy case having a white interior and plenty of ventilation.

 

[Deleted member 197115]

white interior and plenty of ventilation

Sounds like ICU.

 

[Durge Driven]

Bit confused why are you removing cards when doing a fresh OS ?
Just disconnect internet anytime you do fresh OS
You should have a archive of everything you need

If you run W10 redo your thumb drive with 22H2 version
ie: download new media tool

Download Windows 10

 

[Novopaine]

Swap the SSD? Oh, no, you dropped that absurdly-tiny screw into a black hole!

Been there, done that!

You forgot one ->>> ...and why does the magnetic screwdriver go missing right when you need it?!?!

 

[jgf]

It is all about profit. Manufacturers will design and sell what the majority of the market will buy. They could easily build better computers but not enough people would be willing to pay for such a system. The majority of the market is satisfied with what they are getting today.

There's also the "chasing your tail" aspect for many computer owners of non-stop updating and upgrading; how much do you want to pay for something that you will spend an equal amount updating for two years then toss the whole thing and start over? It's not like a car you can drive for five years, sell and recover half your money and buy another; there's little more worthless than a five year old computer. So where's the profit in making them better.

 

[R8pilot]

Card cages were perfectly well developed 50 years ago. All connectors including power are on the back-plane. The insertion guides are on both sides so the card slides in gracefully, and the latches are on the outside edges where humans can operate them. Instead, we now have 5 pound cards sagging pathetically off one edge (needing a jack-stand!), with the latch in an unreachable spot, and an octopus of power connectors wherever-the-heck.

It's been years since the M.2 form-factor came out, but it's too tough a problem to have some sort of slide-in, flip or button-push mechanic instead of that tiny screw?

This is not engineering, it's lazy "that will do, and we'll save 3 cents too."

I thought the latest x-box looked like it was extremely well engineered, but of course it's not intended to be opened or modified. And Apple gets hammered for making devices that aren't user-accessible. But look inside those never-to-be-opened cases, and their engineering isn't just engineering, it's ART.

We are stuck with bad engineering from the 80's. The industry isn't willing to make anything but the most minor, incremental changes for fear of losing some sort of legacy compatibility, and they hate even doing that. So we now we get a single-cable graphics card power cable instead of 3, and that's it for the "big" innovations for the next 5 years.

Oh, but look: RGB Lights everywhere! And a demon/dragon/whatever gif plays on a tiny screen right on the card! That's the "innovation" we do get!