[mjburgess]

"Upgrades" havent been a thing for nearly a decade. By the time you want to upgrade a machine part (c. 5yr+ for modern machines), you'd want to upgrade every thing, and its cheap to do so.

It isnt 2005 any more where RAM/CPU/etc. progress benefits from upgrading every 6mo. It's closer to 6yr to really notice

[cesarb]

> By the time you want to upgrade a machine part (c. 5yr+ for modern machines), you'd want to upgrade every thing,

That's only the case for CPU/MB/RAM, because the interfaces are tightly coupled (you want to upgrade your CPU, but the new one uses an AM5 socket so you need to upgrade the motherboard, which only works with DDR5 so you need to upgrade your RAM). For other parts, a "Ship of Theseus" approach is often worth it: you don't need to replace your 2TB NVMe M.2 storage just because you wanted a faster CPU, you can keep the same GPU since it's all PCIe, and the SATA DVD drive you've carried over since the early 2000s still works the same.

[secabeen]

Even this is understating it; if you buy at the right point in the cycle, you can Ship-of-Theseus quite a while. An AM4 motherboard released in Feb 2017 with a Ryzen 1600X CPU, DDR4 memory and a GTX780 Ti would be a obsolete system by today's standards. Yet, that AM4 motherboard can be upgraded to run a Ryzen 5800X3D CPU, the same (or faster) DDR4 memory, and a RTX 5070Ti GPU and be very competitive with mid-tier 2026 systems containing all new components. Throughout all this, the case, PSU, cooling solution, storage could all be maintained, and only replaced when individual components fail.

I expect many users would be happy with the above final state through 2030, when the AM6 socket releases. That would be 13 years of service for that original motherboard, memory, case and ancillary components. This is an extreme case, you have to time the initial purchase perfectly, but it is possible.

[bigyabai]

That's news to me. I see Mac Minis with external drives plugged-in constantly; I bet those people would appreciate user-servicable storage. I doubt they bought an external drive because they wanted to throw away the whole computer.

[dghlsakjg]

Mac minis have user serviceable storage: https://store.m4-ssd.com/products/third-party-ssd-for-mac-mi...

[aaronblohowiak]

External drive is workaround to apple’s pricing scheme, often purchased at same time as computer.

[heraldgeezer]

You can keep CPU and RAM for way longer than the GPU if you game...

Your point kind of disproves your point.

[mjburgess]

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

[bigyabai]

Case in point. Most popular cards are discrete GPUs that can be upgraded.