I used to be a retail PC service tech back when these things were new. I remember scoffing at the “never obsolete” tag. They were obsolete while still new in the box.
me: “It’s pretty slow now, if you keep it a couple years, you get to buy someone else’s post upgrade for cheap assuming the company is still around, you don’t get the replacement from us”
During the era it wasn’t rare to upgrade components on the motherboard and ISA/PCI bus cards. We’d had some relatively stable CPU socket standards and you’d do things like change out CPU and ram for upgrades.
Was this a stupid marketing gimmick? Oh yeah. Was it unreasonable to talk about upgrading a system at home? Not really. We did do it for a while.
I used to be a retail PC service tech back when these things were new. I remember scoffing at the “never obsolete” tag. They were obsolete while still new in the box.
I worked in retail sales at the time.
customer: “What’s the catch?”
me: “It’s pretty slow now, if you keep it a couple years, you get to buy someone else’s post upgrade for cheap assuming the company is still around, you don’t get the replacement from us”
customer: “So what about those Compaq’s?”
It’s literally a computer. In your home. What would you even upgrade? Get two of them maybe?
During the era it wasn’t rare to upgrade components on the motherboard and ISA/PCI bus cards. We’d had some relatively stable CPU socket standards and you’d do things like change out CPU and ram for upgrades.
Was this a stupid marketing gimmick? Oh yeah. Was it unreasonable to talk about upgrading a system at home? Not really. We did do it for a while.