ATX is such an outdated standard. the power connectors are chonky. the data connectors are chonky. it's so fucking 90s. everything is bigger than it needs to be. yet, there's a charm to it, and not just that, it's actually a good standard in so many ways, and i'm really sad because we will likely never have a standard that's so commonplace and so consumer-friendly as ATX again.
like, everything about it is modular, whether it's the PSU, the CPU, the cooling, the GPU, the front panel connectors, the case, the storage... you can buy a dell desktop and put in an ASUS GPU and HP RAM and samsung SSD and move it into a thermaltake case and it will be very happy to have received its new and improved hardware. every connector, whether data or power, is specially keyed so it is literally impossible for you to fuck up unless you are using adapters. even the 2x5 connectors are keyed! you can't put the USB 2.0 plug in the audio socket! the motherboard won't let you! and these are durable and flexible connectors -- not rigid and bespoke as most ribbon cables are. it's so user-friendly and modular and repairable it's beautiful. we are never going to get anything as good as this ever again.
yes, it is theoretically more efficient to put memory and storage and compute on the same chip. but that doesn't fucking matter if you're running 8 different versions of chrome. congrats you're now running for 4 hours instead of 3. manufacturers don't integrate everything onto one chip in the name of performance, they do it in the name of vendor lock-in. still, this seems to be the way everything is going, and it's sad that this era of being able to swap parts out in your PC so easily is likely to be over in a decade or two.
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