I remember the days of incremental PC upgrades being quite commonplace (the 286/386/486/Pentium era). It was sort of a golden time where a relatively poor kid (

I remember the days of incremental PC upgrades being quite commonplace (the 286/386/486/Pentium era). It was sort of a golden time where a relatively poor kid (me) could save his pennies up to buy a small upgrade and keep a system going through various "Ship of Theseus" efforts. I think I managed such an upgrade cycle through 4 generations of CPU while keeping various peripherals in various states staggered across all of that. It also meant that if you had the right supplier you could cobble together barely working computers just able to boot the latest all floppy release of SUSE or something. Today it seems that a decent computer (~$1000k) will simply just run most things perfectly fine for around 5-7 years, after which all the main bus and peripheral tech will have moved on. It's easier to junk that system and buy another one almost from scratch. The main benefit I can think of for still buying your own parts and putting it together (or having somebody put it together) is price/performance /customizability still leads. I was able to retire (give to my wife) an 8 year old desktop which is still perfectly fine for her needs, and buy an all new system, but thread what I wanted through a budget by ultra-specifying specific parts. I couldn't find a pre-built that was close, even after I just paid Microcenter to put it all together for me. This also turned out to be a good idea as they were able to on-the-spot substitute a few pieces based on compatibility and inventory.