If there was a large degree of interchangeability between engines, transmissions, bodies, dashboards (etc) the auto enthusiast community would for sure be building cars from scratch out of parts. But realistically the pieces are tightly coupled and you can't pick and chose.
It's the same with coffee machines - if there were interchangable pumps and boilers and group heads etc, I bet building your own coffee machine would be the norm in a certain crowed.
And to be clear there's good technical, aesthetic, regulatory and business why most large machine's are made of interchangeable parts. I'm not saying car and espresso machine manufacturers have done something nefarious. Just that PCs happen to be free of a major constraint.
It's not about the space, but rather standards and engineering. Old flip phone was as busy around the battery as is modern smartphone. It's hard to change a dying battery if its glued in behind a solid case, no matter the device.
Currently the trendy ultra small PC cases are going in the same direction with tightly coupled components, not in the connector spec, but dimensional fits.
Whats the difference, really? If your laptop CPU and RAM are socketed you can replace/upgrade. If mobos and peripherals were standardized you'd see macs with thinkpad keyboards, and thinkpads with mac internals.
Why should we have to buy a whole new computer if we want to upgrade one thing?
The car example is also telling. Yes most people buy pre-built, but the vast majority of pieces can also be bought to repair or replace.
I am not questioning repairs (which almost never happen, as PC hardware in general is very robust these days) or upgrades to factory-built PCs (which should account for probably 1% of the PC component retail volume). I am wondering why there is an entire industry selling colorful boxes (as opposed to brown cardboard with a part number) with things that are not usable in any way when taken out of the box and are only functional when combined with 10+ other things in somewhat nontrivial way. Forget about "why shouldn't it" and "it was like this forever" and look at this phenomenon with a fresh eye. This is ridiculous (in a factual way, not saying this judgmentally).
Just this month:
- Wifes friends laptop: installed new NVME and upgraded with additional 2.5 SSD, had to get SATA cable from china since no one else had it - Replaced fuel hose on my old e34, need to replace fuel pump on the diesel before end of the year, replaced tires (summer to winter) - Replaced charging flex cable on my Poco X3 smartphone - Changed the door gasket on the office fridge
Last month I replaced peltier element in wifes makeup fridge, this summer a starting cap in the office fan, last year old caps in vintage amplifier I got cheap.
My father threw out almost new fridge few years back due to ripped gasket, wife almost got rid of the makeup fridge when the cooling element went out, her friend started looking for new laptop because "old" one had "boot device missing". If you don't care to fix/upgrade or don't know how, then yes, everything is a black box.
"Industry" is f-ing us over and people with your attitude are encouraging it.
r/buildapc has 2.9M weekly viewers for a reason.
In short, standards exist because IBM built the original PC in 12 months using off-the-shelf parts and published the full technical specs...obviously copycats took off with them and reverse-engineered the bios.
IBM did try to close it when they launched PS/2 with Micro Channel architecture (proprietary, with licensing fees). The industry formed a consortium and created an open alternative, which was bad for IBM.
The colorful boxes exist because there's a profitable consumer market for components, which exists because the standards remained open, which happened because the industry defended them against the company that created the platform. Maybe this clears things up a bit.
The first home computers were sold as kits and put together by fervent hobbyists. The original PCs relied on many iterations of standardization and competition amongst clones to become cheap enough to hit peak household adoption. Now PC use is waning in favor of tablets, phones, and smart TVs. As before, the pool of PC users includes a higher-than-average concentration of enthusiasts who enjoy to tinker, thus sustaining a market.
I strongly suspect that if we had phones that were as modular as computers, they'd be very popular.
Computers are just the most obvious example because they are expensive, easy to assemble, and have a high markup (which can be obscured on Tim's like now, as there is a larger lag time for component price increases to effect them).
A PC was similarly a collection of base unit, monitor, printer, keyboard, mouse, and other components connected via interface cards plugged into a standard bus. Memory was also originally on cards plugged into the bus.
Ultimately, I'd love it if there were enough standards out there where I could spec out a car, and have it built up from parts...or just buy a stock one, if that's what I wanted. I feel that way about a lot of products that I interact with -- appliances usually have shitty UX, car software is usually garbage, and I'd love it if I didn't have to rely on DJI for a drone (good luck getting them in the U.S. anymore, anyway).
I think that with any product there's a subset of people who are like, "Eh, good enough," and willing to buy whatever the big manufacturers are pushing, but there's a smaller subset that wants to really dial-in something that fits their needs.
I can go out and buy a new steroe, new muffler, new seats, etc. for my car and replace them, just like parts in a desktop.
how is this even an idea