All of the above is accurate, but OP's falling into that trap of counterjerking a reactionary culture and missing the target.
Being able to perform basic repairs/component installation can be the difference between a paperweight and a functional computer for the folks who don't have the privileges you list.
Whereas those that do will never need to learn the skill, the worst case is they spend an extra $500 on a machine they could've built themselves. And let's be real, nowadays most of those folks are just gonna buy a laptop instead.
The actual substantive critique for the pcpartpicker/buildapc/tomshardware/whatever culture is that it's peak fucking consumerist and there's absolutely no god damn emphasis on re-using the absolute fucking mountain of silicon gathering dust in tech recycler/reseller outlets across the country. The exact opposite, in fact.
You can walk into one of those resellers right now and buy an optiplex for ~$100, some components for another ~$100 and a monitor for ~$25 and have a computer that's equipped to handle the chromium-based apps and 5 MB javascript bundles that comprise modern desktop computing (another tech culture target worthy of critique) and run most games except the latest ones. Shit if you get a job there they'll probably let you take home all that for free.
But no one watches content about that shit, they just wanna see linus put 128 $5000 nvidia gpus into a massive chassis or someone run benchmarks on the latest piece of silicon (whose manufacturers have a vested interest in folks buying a new one every ~2 years).
All of the above is accurate, but OP's falling into that trap of counterjerking a reactionary culture and missing the target.
Being able to perform basic repairs/component installation can be the difference between a paperweight and a functional computer for the folks who don't have the privileges you list.
Whereas those that do will never need to learn the skill, the worst case is they spend an extra $500 on a machine they could've built themselves. And let's be real, nowadays most of those folks are just gonna buy a laptop instead.
The actual substantive critique for the pcpartpicker/buildapc/tomshardware/whatever culture is that it's peak fucking consumerist and there's absolutely no god damn emphasis on re-using the absolute fucking mountain of silicon gathering dust in tech recycler/reseller outlets across the country. The exact opposite, in fact.
You can walk into one of those resellers right now and buy an optiplex for ~$100, some components for another ~$100 and a monitor for ~$25 and have a computer that's equipped to handle the chromium-based apps and 5 MB javascript bundles that comprise modern desktop computing (another tech culture target worthy of critique) and run most games except the latest ones. Shit if you get a job there they'll probably let you take home all that for free.
But no one watches content about that shit, they just wanna see linus put 128 $5000 nvidia gpus into a massive chassis or someone run benchmarks on the latest piece of silicon (whose manufacturers have a vested interest in folks buying a new one every ~2 years).
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peak peertube content would be a video series where they visit a reseller and build random boxes and then do cool shit with those boxes
don't get me started on rpi/microcontroller culture either that shit's just as problematic for most of the same reasons
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Probably because they actually use them as microcontrollers instead of general purpose arm servers
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