As I’ve said on more than a few occasions, I didn’t get into tech because I loved tech or gadgets. Number one it was the 1980s and I didn’t think I could afford what was out there and number two I was just looking for a better way to do my writing. Alas, it would be easy for someone looking at my home-office/tech set-up to misinterpret it as something someone with a tech fixation would have. But it’s more because I’ve been at this for 39-years than anything else.
Not long into my journey as a home computer user1 I became acquainted with the need to open their cases up to do repairs and small upgrades. This process was sped along when the company who produced the first couple micro-computers I bought went out of business and then the first PC that I bought was a PC clone from a PC “club” where you’d buy the parts and they’d help you build it. I learned to appreciate that if a component went bad I had the option to go to a place like Fry’s Electronics and purchase a replacement part. This was possible because PC clones had open architecture and allowed for some levels of repairability by anyone able to use a screwdriver and follow directions. While I never intended it, my tech expertise was born out of the necessity of keeping these computers up and running.
We were tech hobbyists and troubleshooting, repairing and upgrading took the bulk of my time using tech. Even when I switched to Apple I bought models that allowed for access to their innards for repairs or minor upgrades2. Of course this gradually began to change with laptops and any all-in-one models and a lot of my fellow hobbyists protested the loss of accessibility and repairability.
But truthfully as the market had matured and the reliability of parts improved, I rarely found myself opening up the cases to replace parts. Generally if I wanted to upgrade the computer it was when a new CPU came out or some other big tech change and I wasn’t just going to need to replace chips, but I’d need to replace the CPU and the motherboard and the memory sticks and often the disk storage and power supply. In fact the only thing that I recycled was the case, but even then cases got replaced too. So, what was the value of the open architecture again?
Most of us, beginning with myself, didn’t really want to have to crack open our PC cases to do the repairs. Having more reliable PCs that lasted longer would have been a better solution. Buying Apple products was more expensive, but I replaced them half as often and found that I was spending more time doing the thing (writing/blogging/video/photo editing) that I bought the computer to do in the first place. In the beginning I spent thousands of dollars on my technology in small amounts quite frequently. But more recently I’ve kept my tech for longer stretches… spending more in the initial investment but less over the long term and often getting a lot more usage and power for the price.
There will always be those who want to open up their gear and “make improvements,” just automotive gear heads from a previous generation. But most of us, just want our tech to work when we need it and not require anything else from us. Just work, please.
What’s been your relationship to your technology? Does it drive you or do you drive it?
- Home computers were called “micro-computers” I guess to differentiate them from mini-computers which were the size of large carts and mainframe computers which were the size of large rooms.[↩]
- The first time I cracked up a Mac Mini I was duly impressed with the beauty of its design especially in comparison to my PC Towers with their messy cables and lots of wasted space.[↩]
