cyclone3d wrote on 2025-02-18, 18:28:
Yeah, Dell did some weird stuff back in the day. A PSU that slide-locked into the bottom of the case was one of them.
Funny thing is... they really haven't changed at all.
Their midsize desktops are still a disastrous mix of wasted engineering time\energy and planned obsolescence.
I get the impression that this is some kind of deeply ingrained aspect of the way the company operates. Like, multiple levels of people creating nonsense busy-work to justify the existence of their job and to make use of engineering educations that would probably be better used in other fields.
Why else would you end up with nearly 25 years of atrocious proprietary case (and PSU, motherboard, I\O.....) designs that do not solve any actual problems? We know they don't solve any problems because the designs completely change every 5-10 years, and every generation gets more proprietary with more irritating quirks and worse thermal performance. They can't even use the excuse that the modern designs are there to make assembly faster,simpler and more reliable: Because the average modern desktop requires almost NO cards or even cables aside from power. In that vein, apparently the existence of a couple pre-wired front panel I\O connectors was a problem that needed engineered-away, giving birth to the idiotic L-shaped E-Waste boards with the front I\O built into the motherboard.
I will concede that Dell's SFF and Mini sized Optiplex systems have generally been nice designs that made good use of space, and were easy to swap parts in\out of, even if they were proprietary.
However, no PC has any business being ITX, MicroATX or ATX size while not using any of those standards.
I feel like OEMs like HP and Dell should have canned all of the engineers designing their midsize (and up) desktops 15-20 years ago, and instead used that money to periodically (when required by changes in components) buy current designs from companies that have the latest understanding of thermal management, acoustics and efficient use of materials. Imagine if the last 15 years of desktops from Dell\Alienware, HP and Lenovo used MicroATX or even ITX motherboards and all off-the-shelf compatible components and had good thermals and acoustics.
... but yeah... something something shareholders... profits... etc.
Bleh.
*grumble grumble*
😒
