Last year, i was totally sure i will not upgrade my PC for another decade. One day i used my computer, and suddenly, it died on me. I tought its the power supply, but later on, it turned out, its the motherboard. I took it out, and found a short circuit. A capacitor shorted. I didnt knew which one, so i have quickly built a voltage injection circuit, to inject some amps into the board. With this, i was able to find the dead cap (the one that became hot). However, even after removing the cap, and replacing it with another one, the motherboard newer booted up again.
There was nothing i could do, i had to buy at least a new motherboard. I started digging up all my circles and second hand web sites. Everything i found was crappy. A typical modern motherboard is very limited. No floppy connectors. No PCI, or if there was PCI, only one or two. No IDE connectors. 2 or 4 SATA port. 2 RAM slot. No LPT and serial pins. All of them was a short, tiny sized, retarded, dwarfed variation of a normal motherboard, without any backward compatibility to the hardware of the previous decades.
I have checked other hardware too
Computer cases were laughable. A normal computer case is about 10 kilograms. These were about two. No 5.25 bays to insert an optical drive or a mobile rack, basically just a power and reset switch. They sometimes started playing with the ATX standards by placing the PSU at the bottom. What the fuck? So if my psu throws flame, it should lit the carpet and burn the house down? The biggest feature of the cases were transparent windows on the side, with fans with integrated leds, changing color in every second. I am prety sure if this would be the feature i wanted, i would just put the christmas lights into the computer.
Keyboards and other products
I have checked the keyboards a few years ago too. I wanted to buy a standard hungarian QWERTZ keyboard. Every key was smaller, the keys was too close to each other. The cursor and numpad section of the keyboard was too close to each other. First i did this online. After i found no proper ones, i went to a local store. After investigating all of them, i asked the seller to go to the basement, and bring up some proper keyboard for me. He told that he have no other models, and all of them is like this. So i went to another computer shop. The same thing happened. The seller was showing me the same crappy keyboards, and i asked her to show bigger and bigger models. At the very bottom of the keyboard heap, there was one keyboard that was standard, and had proper sized keys. The seller told me that this is the last piece of this type, and there will be no other models from this - ever. It was luckily only $8 so i bought it. Basically if you want to buy a motherfucking keyboard to actually TYPE wih it, you must buy a vintage 20 year old keyboard from a 486 or Pentium 1, because they only manufacture retarded models, unless you want to pay an extra $100 on it.
Graphics cards
The graphics cards released in the last 10 years will consume about 25w in idle, even the most low-end ones, from both nVidia or AMD. Sadly the integrated cards on the older boards are too crappy and will not display video content properly and/or will be unstable under certain tasks due to obsolete drivers. If you buy a dedicated one for PCI-E, than that will usually work properly, however you have to live with an increased power consumption due to the chip will be optimized for 3D performance which maybe you wont even need. The passive models are also rare to find, and they will work very hot when they are on - they will warm up the whole computer from inside for no reason, even in idle.
Why is this a problem
Assuming you buy a computer because you actually want to use it as a computer, and not as a content-consuming sedation machine to view cat videos. If you buy a PC that also means you have some understanding, and you are going to use those IT skills to offer some services, or at least in your daily life to do your work. This means, from time to time, you will have to work on/with your computer beyond basic office usage. Maybe you want to burn a driver CD for someone, you may want to recover data from a dying hard disk of a costumer, you just want to burn someones wedding videos with a first-generation DVD burner to ensure its being read in every drive, you maybe want to plug in your microscope into the TV input, your old printer and other type of industrial apparatus into the computer to print some flyers... And you cant do it any more.
Why?
Because they have removed everything from the motherboard. They even had removed the PCI slots, so you cant add enough add-on cards any more. If you are lucky, you can find some of these add-ons as PCI-e variants for one extra zero on the price ticket than it used to be. But your motherboard will probably not even have enough PCI-e slots to fit all of this. Alternatively you can try using USB converters of these various plugs, and then there will be cables everywhere, which you have to search every time you want to use them, and you will face compatibility issues, some device will just not work properly (for example, USB LPT adapters).
Power supply
Power supply manufacturers adapted this trend, they are removing MOLEX connectors, and adding only SATA power connectors. Not too much from it, because WHO POSSIBLY COULD NEED THEM aniway? Instead, they add two 6 or 8 pin graphics card connectors. Basically, the cabels on the typical power supply summarizes up the situation: you cant connect anything to your PC, the autistic gamer manchild can put the 6-pin VGA connector up into his ass, while he is screeching to the vibrating color lights of the PC case fan.
The CPU power is not everything
If you want to use newer CPU, you can only do them in these type of retarded motherboards. But computers are not only about CPU-s. Maybe you just want to sacrafice a little CPU power, and go with an obsolete 10-15 year old computer design instead. The power of an early Core2Quad, i7, Opteron, Athlon2, Xeon CPU will be still enough for modern usage, and it will support enough memory (8Gb, 16Gb, or even 32GB) to run a modern workload with the newest operating systems. Buying a modern system is a really bad idea if you actually working on your computer.
Why people even buying that sorrow?
As the typical desktop PC user experience is turning into a content consuming market, including phones, tablets, laptops, it was inevitable for the hardware to take this direction too. A modern PC is barely usable for work any more beyond office usage, CAD, and of course for gaming. The other areas of a typical desktop usage is cannot be fulfilled with the new type of computers. There are motherboards designed for industrial and server use, which support some of these older features. However, they are limited, they maybe cant work with certain types of hardware due to missing DMA or IRQ capabilities, or just the drivers are too limited to offer compatibility with certain devices. Motherboards manufactured about 2010 and later, lost the ability to be able to build a real computer from them. In the future, it could be hard to find proper motherboards, so maybe it could be a good idea to buy a few for future usage or resale in the case of a shortage of proper hardware.
How to avoid a bad decision
Before buying any parts of a PC, evaluate what you possible need to do your job. Even evaluate before buying a case, or a power supply. If you buying a motherboard, ensure, it have all the essencial connectors that you can need. If you have ended up buying the wrong solution, then you will need to buy add-on PCI-e cards to do some of the jobs. If you ended up with a bad PC case, then you will have to buy a new one that allows you to put in all of your hardware that you need for your daily life and work.
The article is an eye opener, especially when making a decision to buy a modern PC. It shows that one really needs to align purpose with the proposed gadget to be bought.