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RE: Throw Away Consumerism
I certainly agree that the "assemble it myself" route is less practical than in years past, at least when the goal is to simply get something that works well enough without costing a lot. In my case though, I enjoy knowing what all the bits and pieces involved are, and enjoy the manual labor of assembling them into a working whole. In a sense I'm like the car guys who think nothing of spending many months of work and many tens of thousands of dollars restoring a decades-old wreck, rather than just picking something up from the local Honda dealer.
Also, I'm not even sure how much longer I'll be able to take his approach. It's easy to look at today's laptops and extrapolate the trend toward greater and greater integration forward into the not too distant future when a new computer is a flat panel monitor with the CPU cluster, GPU array, and a terabyte of solid state disk all built in. At this point, the act of "building" the computer is reduced to picking out a mouse and keyboard in matching colors and setting them within range of the wireless interface.
As much as I look forward to advancements in computer technology, this is the point at which I'll have to revert to wire-wrapping 8080-based Altair-clones to get my computer hardware jollies.
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Throw Away Consumerism
I hate to admit it, but at this point home computers have pretty much gone the way of hum-drum throw-away consumer electronics for me. In other words I usually buy the cheapest darn thing I can find at a Big Box loss leader giveaway or something, and use it until it breaks. (My wife has something to do with these decisions btw) Home use is mostly internet, word-processing, regular multimedia, etc. It's no fun anymore because in the PC world, anything you buy is more than adequate for these things. We had a $250 eMachines (Black Friday) that lasted about 2 years. Something happened to the motherboard, so we casually went out and bought another one, just like you would pick out a cheap TV for the bedroom. I took the memory and the ridiculously enormous hard drive, CD player, etc. out of the old one; put it next to the even more obscenely huge hard drive in the new one ( voiding the warrantee, I'm sure) , and here we are.
Something about this bothers me in some ways, but on the other hand I've had absolutely no problems with these machines when you factor in their price.
Work is a different story. CAD/CAM applications are memory and graphics intensive, and it makes a big difference when you have something that can handle it. But even these are not so hard to buy anymore, and the prices for these powerhouses are still in line with that old Packard Bell (it still lives!) that had all the 'bells and whistles' we shelled out for so many years ago.
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