The ease and affordability of buying off-the-shelf devices make them hard to resist. But putting together your very own computer still makes sense, and how
In the post-PC world, building your own computer seems like a quaint anachronism, a dying ritual harking back to an age when Microsoft and Intel ruled the PC world and Apple only made machines used by graphic designers.
Back then, building your own “custom PC” was the more affordable way to buy a computer, in case you didn’t have the pocket for branded PCs that cost between 50 percent and 100 percent more. But then, our economy got liberalised and the global tech industry got commoditised. Falling import duties combined with global manufacturing moving to China and Taiwan, which could crank out reliable PCs and components by the tens of millions at unbelievably low costs. The differential between branded and custom-built PCs started disappearing. Laptops became much cheaper. And, finally, with the advent of post-PC smartphones and tablets, people started giving up their desktop PCs altogether.
Of what use is a desktop when your latest tablet sports a quad-core processor and 2GB of memory? Who wants a noisy and ugly old box with wires criss-crossing its dusty body when you could have a gleaming unibody aluminium-and-glass iMac?
Well, for beginners, you should.
Four types of PCs
(This story appears in the 19 April, 2013 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)