Agreed, the problem is two-fold though. The "sales morons" and "technical" staff at most PC stores are absolutely useless, but you cannot blame them their objectives are to ensure a steady cash flow to the business owner. Also, the average Joe seems to be terrified of anything that works with this magical thing called electricity. We do need to find a middle ground somewhere.
And it is exactly because the average Joe is so terrified of electronic things that, if a company like Asus wants to broaden their market to include these terrified people Asus need to....
I don't think going full retard modular is the right way, but there are some techniques that we can employ from the enterprise world that will be a comfortable middle ground. Servers and Enterprise SAN/NAS products for years now have hot swappable hard drive bays. Like this wonderful Dell example:
...go full retard modular. The realm of servers does indeed prove to us that this is something that can be done, and I am really perplexed as to why modular design hasn't already entered the normal PC marked already. If PC component upgrading is to be appealing to the uneducated masses, it has to be aimed as the most simplest and dumbass proof way possible. Hence why I would say going full retard modular is the right way to go.
I believe that a few simple "modifications" to existing slot/port designs and a couple of new standards will make things easier. However I still believe that there are a few things that should remain in the realm of "the professionals"
The professionals should not be needed for a mundane system that sits in someone's study or bedroom. It should be a matter of simply taking your modular component, and stick it into the case. Done. No cables. No professionals. No hassle. No issues. Only then would something like PC upgrading become more widespread, increasing sales of components, making more money for Asus and other companies, and getting people to get back into PCs, away from laptops, away from tablets and away from consoles.
If we can get to the point where the case only needs to be opened up to replace a motherboard, CPU and PSU. Everything else can quite easily be insertable through an opening of sorts. You will however STILL have the odd person that calls technical support to assist with inserting a USB flash drive into a USB port.
Correction, you will assist them inserting their USB flash drives into HDMI ports, because it looks like it would fit, therefor it must....(heh)
In your example here, Imagine buying a bare-bones case, suck as stated here, for a fraction of the cost. The CPU is set and cannot be changed, same goes for the PSU and mobo, but everything else can and must be added separately. Almost like a game selling cheaply with microtransactions or DLC. It is somewhat the same business model, one that would be totally different from the normal traditional PC business model, one that more retarded non technical people can get into, and pull them away from their laptops to some extent. I can actually see that working well
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