I realize different context, but I'm curious how many other HNers do the same as me: I haven't had a fully new personal desktop computer since ~2001.
Since I originally built it, it's undergone dozens of upgrades: close to a half dozen motherboards, a few more CPUs, several GPUs, lots of RAM, drives, etc. I think 3 cases, and at least that many power supplies. But it was never all at one time. I definitely did a couple generational upgrades that were nearly everything, but stopped short. There's literally nothing left from the original build.
The parts were always then passed down to other uses: builds for other people, or a server in my basement.
This year, due to a failing motherboard, I did probably the biggest upgrade I've ever done at once; including AMD over to Intel, new case, SATA SSD to NVMe, but still but full: I kept the power supply (I hust bought it a couple months earlier, thinking it was the thing causing me trouble) and GPU (impossible to buy something reasonable).
We're in serious "Ship of Theseus" territory here. Personally, I think the moment you switch mainboards, you have a new computer (even if mostly consisting of 'old' parts).
Absolutely -- it's like the PC of Theseus. I'm mixed on the motherboard thing. There's at least one instance where I changed only the motherboard, and so that didn't really feel like a "new" PC.
I think it was AMD AM3 to AM3+, enabled because AMD retained CPU socket compatibility. I needed a new board for another system, so instead of buying a new "old" board, I bought one for my main PC that was still compatible with my existing CPU (Phenom II ?), then used the old board for the other system. I later upgraded to a faster, newer generation CPU.
Agreed, the motherboard is what the computer really is. Maybe if I knew more about ship(building) I would have a similar opinion on the Ship of Theseus.
The last "new" computer I bought was a laptop in 2011. A 13-inch Macbook Pro with a 2nd gen i7. After that, I've always bought used, as the place where I'm in right now, the people prefer the newest shit, so I happily buy their used laptops for cheaps. Mind you, these are T480 Thinkpads that people are selling for very cheap in order to buy the latest.
I haven't bought a new computer for myself since I started working full time in 2012. Since then e-waste computers with a new SSD have been fine for me. I don't even need to upgrade RAM since you can usually find a few identical e-waste computers at once and just fill up the slots on one.
Since I originally built it, it's undergone dozens of upgrades: close to a half dozen motherboards, a few more CPUs, several GPUs, lots of RAM, drives, etc. I think 3 cases, and at least that many power supplies. But it was never all at one time. I definitely did a couple generational upgrades that were nearly everything, but stopped short. There's literally nothing left from the original build.
The parts were always then passed down to other uses: builds for other people, or a server in my basement.
This year, due to a failing motherboard, I did probably the biggest upgrade I've ever done at once; including AMD over to Intel, new case, SATA SSD to NVMe, but still but full: I kept the power supply (I hust bought it a couple months earlier, thinking it was the thing causing me trouble) and GPU (impossible to buy something reasonable).