I haven’t thought about it in a while but the premise of the article rings true. Desktops are overall disposable. Gpu generations are only really significant with new cpu generations. CPUs are the same with real performance needed a new chipset and motherboard. At that point you are replacing the whole system.
Is there a platform that challenges that trend?
Edit Good points were made. There is a lot to disagree with in the article, especially when focused on gaming.
Storage For the love of your data : storage is a WEAR component. Especially with HDD. Up until recently storage was so cheap it was crazy not to get new drives every few years.
Power Supplies Just because the computer still boots doesn’t mean the power supply is still good. A PSU will continue to shove power into your system long past the ability to provide clean power. Scope and test an older PSU before you put it on a new build.
I think the real thing you have learned is that PC upgrades are largely unnecessary. They are only selling new hardware that is better on paper and they need to create compatibility traps to make you upgrade a bunch of other shit to get that incremental upgrade.
I think a lot of people really just fail to analyze if the thing they are going to get is worth the cost. Like if you have a perfectly good DDR4 system is it really worth a thousand dollars to upgrade every component in order to get what, an extra 5 FPS? People are spending a lot of money doing upgrades and expecting to get the kind of improvements you got ten years ago, and its just not going to happen because hardware hasn’t been improving at that rate for a long time.
Even still, there are a lot of components that are not cheap that you can reuse regardless of CPU socket and memory compatibility changes. I’ve used the same PSU and case and drives and network card for a decade. That’s all shit I would have had to pay for over and over again with a different type of system.
How many full backups do you have of the data on a decade old drive?
Storage is one of the most relevant things to be continually replacing. I have decade old drives as well but they live in tandem with their replacements as mirrors. Until recently storage was so insanely cheap there was little reason not to replace it.
12 4tb drives in mirrored pairs in a zfs pool on a headless server supporting our local media server and various other data storage needs. The only stuff on the desktop is game installs and software.
Most of us who survived desktop gaming and media piracy in the early 2000 learned not to keep anything important locally cause your gonna have to wipe your os every now and then.