Hello. Many of the older thinkpads were regarded as being peak for the ability to repair and easily see into them at both the hardware and software levels.
I was wondering, what PC, if any, is similar in this regard? Aside from building your own PC ofc. Any opinions are welcome. Thank you.
Not trying to pick a beef with Steve at all, very much respect his work. Or you for that matter. The question here is about workhorse PCs not gaming PCs. Gaming is a niche. Dell will absolutely sell you parts, or eBay or third party resellers. You’ve mentioned in your own post you can absolutely upgrade the GPU and PSU with standard consumer parts (even in a custom build you’d need cables specific to your modular power supply), even CPUs are upgradable within limits (again, with the exception of modern Ryzen when have you been able to upgrade more than 1 generation of CPU for a given socket?)
I’ll 100% agree Dell don’t conform to typical consumer standard parts that custom/small run builders use in a lot of cases, but to say they’re not upgradable or repairable just isn’t true. If someone was complaining their BMW gearbox wouldn’t bolt onto their ford engine without some modification they’d struggle to find anyone who finds that a remotely strange situation.
I don’t think you understand the problem. The power supply Dell included with their standard Xeon wasn’t regular ATX so it couldn’t work with a regular GPU. I replaced the 10 year old Dell power supply with a 15 year old standard ATX.
Buying unsupported hardware to make it work and dremeling the case wasn’t your original claim that Dell etc are an easy phone call to upgrade your PC. They absolutely will not upgrade it.
The OP didn’t make any reference to their buying a PC for a large corporation. So extolling the large corporate benefits of support contracts isn’t relevant. For a user without a support contract, a regular PC will be easier and cheaper to maintain.
Edit referencing your car analogy:
If every other car manufacturer let you drop in an engine from any other car without even buying a different screw except BMW, everyone would rightly criticize BMW for being proprietary.
Regular PC’s, which makes up around 70% of the desktop PC market, are completely interchangeable right down to the screw sizes. It’s only Dell/HP/Lenovo that are a minority of the desktop PC market and are incompatible.