“(…) desktops are all built from the same interchangeable pool of parts (…)”
Being a white-box junkie all my life, this is what matters the most to me: in the journey away from the desktop we’ve lost the very foundation of what was the real engine behind all the progress and technological advance for so long…
I guess pure marketing and consumerism are supposed to take over that role, but I can’t help imagining how that could change when I see projects like the Raspberry Pi and others like that.
Just remember what Apple (and NeXT and others) hardware was in the 80’s… most of it custom. Apple only survived by commoditizing its own hardware. Now I see no way to commoditize the components of these new devices, being as they are so tiny and differentiating themselves on shape and size, constantly.
I want my white-box desktop… I want to tinker, to have myriad of choices for every single component, and I want to be the one who replaces the parts. And I want the barrier to create a newer-better component to be as low as possible.