Built to a price point

It's not just the chipset, it's everything:
- lack of expansion slots (especially AGP/PCI-E x16)
- lack of drive bays
- lack of IDE cable connectors (yes, cheap systems in the late 1990s used IDE cables with two connectors instead of three, so if you wanted to add a second drive, you had to replace the IDE cable. This was common enough early boxed retail CD-RW drives came with a replacement IDE cable)
- lack of memory slots
- lack of decent networking options (you can probably buy a new system today with a 10/100 Ethernet controller onboard)
etc.

Cheap systems are built to be cheap. A few dollars here, a few cents here, etc., if you wanted to use the same CPU/RAM/drives/etc but you wanted to put it on a more extendable board/case/etc, you'd probably up the cost $50-100. That's a very big problem for the type of markets that were buying these systems. If you were speccing out a Dell Dimension 2400 for your elderly aunt or grandmother in 2003, would you really tell her to spend $100 more for a system with AGP, more SATA ports, a faster FSB, etc? Realistically, that machine survived just fine with some extra RAM until 2009 when it got replaced with a cheap C2Q running Win7, so spending $100 more for a nicer board would have been a total waste.

Yep the OEMs were very cost conscience, the majority of their computers were lower end ! Is why the retail motherboard companies did so well with gamers, IT techs, etc in 90's until today 😀

Horun wrote on 2025-04-06, 01:13:

Yep the OEMs were very cost conscience, the majority of their computers were lower end ! Is why the retail motherboard companies did so well with gamers, IT techs, etc in 90's until today 😀

Even the 'high end' machines, I might add. It continues to astound me to this day, 24-25 years later, how many PIII 1GHz processors appear to have found themselves into i810 systems (with obviously no AGP) from the big OEMs. These weren't exactly 600MHz Celeries here. A 1GHz Coppermine full PIII was a serious CPU. That machine probably would have been the highest-priced or close at worst buy or whatever retailer sold it.

I might add - this is the origin of this trend of having 'gaming PCs' at worst buy and other retailers. There was a time in the early-mid 2000s when you basically couldn't get a computer with discrete graphics in a non-specialized store. Eventually, they realized there was a market for non-DIY gaming machines and created this category of 'gaming PCs'.

CPUs are binned into seperate models because the silicon doesn't always turn out perfect. Onboard cache & CPU speed is tested.

As well as chipsets / motherboards having low end versions to make the whole system cheaper.

The main price points target
1) Businesses looking for high priced tax write-offs, and high future resale price.
2) Consumers looking to spend a moderate price for the latest & greatest.
3) Consumers looking for the bare minimum - new or second hand.

CPUs & chipsets can be optimised for all these.

Good question. It's a science of its own, I'm afraid.
Production costs is just one factor of many.
Example: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_segmentation

As a radio tinkerer (CB, crystal radios etc), I drew the conclusion that most products sold today are intentionally "defective" fresh from factory and that we citizen have to fix them on our own before use.
Basically not too different like we had to fix stuff our radios and cars in ca. 1950 when living in a village or on the country side.
You have plastic gears that break, you have missing capacitors (empty spots on PCB),
diodes that are too weak, electro motor that burn or have poor bearings etc.

The sad or ironic thing is that military/maritime equipment is about the only thing that's still "normal" in terms of quality (radio transceivers etc).
Or that'show it used to be. Nowadays, that stuff perhaps nolonger is as rugged as it used to be.

(In my country, the "military" basically orders cheap plastic stuff that doesn't work correctly - but hey, it's modern!
There had been news about it in the past months/years,
it was about new digital radio transceivers that are supposed to replace the old SEM 80/90 models.)

In computing, industrial and server products are usually of higher quality, still.
But even here, plastic materials and cheap consumer technology (USB, HDMI, Twisted Pair network cabling) is on the rise, trying to replace things like RS-232/RS-422/RS-485, VGA, Arcnet etc.
And that's bad. Old industrial interfaces had galvanic insulation via opto-couplers, which isn't taken for granted with USB.
USB is cheap, there's no proper locking mechanism, it wears out fast etc

Speaking under correction, I'm just a layman here.

VivienM wrote on 2025-04-06, 02:36:

Horun wrote on 2025-04-06, 01:13:

Yep the OEMs were very cost conscience, the majority of their computers were lower end ! Is why the retail motherboard companies did so well with gamers, IT techs, etc in 90's until today 😀

Even the 'high end' machines, I might add. It continues to astound me to this day, 24-25 years later, how many PIII 1GHz processors appear to have found themselves into i810 systems (with obviously no AGP) from the big OEMs. These weren't exactly 600MHz Celeries here. A 1GHz Coppermine full PIII was a serious CPU. That machine probably would have been the highest-priced or close at worst buy or whatever retailer sold it.

Things have been rather tighter since the late noughts, but it was still happening, despite the celeron, that last years high end sold into this years mid, next years budget boxes. Plus with consumer reluctance to "fall for" P4, the PIII went on a couple or three years past when it was high end. So PIIIs on 820s may have been selling for bargain basement money in 2002 still. With worse quality components and no rizz (Charisma, halo effect) these machines were getting scrapped heavily by the end of the noughts, caps blown up, PSUs failing, clogged with dust and left to die. So a lot of "high end" PIII went to the melting pot with them.

I think it’s funny when you can see the motherboard supports the pinout it but some OEM decided to save $1 by not soldering the physical AGP slot on.

The markups multiply depending on how many manufacturers and distributors are involved through to retail. Meaning "off the shelf" pricing at retail of a 25 cent at initial manufacture addon is suddenly $25. So when the retailer says "ppl aren't buying at $600, they need to be $500" then four more 25 cent parts get the chop.

BinaryDemon wrote on 2025-04-06, 15:26:

I think it’s funny when you can see the motherboard supports the pinout it but some OEM decided to save $1 by not soldering the physical AGP slot on.

It's not just the production cost, it's also support costs - and reputation costs. If you put a slot in there, somebody is going to stick something in it, and when they do there's a nonzero chance they will need help. Even if you only tell them it's not supported and they're on their own, it will have cost you the cost of a support call (USD 10 or so), and an unhappy customer, because they wanted to do something theoretically possible, failed and you didn't help them. Or you do try to help, which makes them happy but costs you a lot more. Not installing that slot if you don't intend to ever use it yourself makes a lot of sense if you put yourself in an OEM's shoes.

dionb wrote on 2025-04-06, 23:06:

BinaryDemon wrote on 2025-04-06, 15:26:

I think it’s funny when you can see the motherboard supports the pinout it but some OEM decided to save $1 by not soldering the physical AGP slot on.

It's not just the production cost, it's also support costs - and reputation costs. If you put a slot in there, somebody is going to stick something in it, and when they do there's a nonzero chance they will need help. Even if you only tell them it's not supported and they're on their own, it will have cost you the cost of a support call (USD 10 or so), and an unhappy customer, because they wanted to do something theoretically possible, failed and you didn't help them. Or you do try to help, which makes them happy but costs you a lot more. Not installing that slot if you don't intend to ever use it yourself makes a lot of sense if you put yourself in an OEM's shoes.

And that's exactly why IBM had struggled with end-users and selling OS/2 to them.
That level of stupidity is difficult to deal with, especially for technicians.
The fundamental problem is censorship/restrictions vs education/schooling.
You can either restrict your children/users by making certain things (scissors/slots or BIOS settings) inaccessible or you can educate your children/users to use them properly.
Unfortunately, businesses try to protect themselves in first place, which keeps end-users stupid and makes them unhappy.
Supplying an instruction manual in human readable form with a good sorted index would be an alternative.

Edit: What would be partly a solution is end-users to require a computer driving license.
So that they can't buy a computer or parts for it without showing a proof that they're skilled enough to use it.
Or make it so that support hotlines ask for a valid computer driving license.
It seems drastic at first, but on other hand the decreasing computer competence must be stopped somehow.
Many schools and companies offer such trainings, so they can get their license easily.
That way, end-users are being forc.., um, encouraged to buy a printed book and "sit down" and learn something about computers and IT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_C … igital_Literacy

Edit: This already had worked once in the 1980s when computer users, end-users had to learn about their conputers in order to use them.
You had those "Computer ABC" books aimed at kids that explained the principle of computers in great detail.
You had descriptions about user ports, datasette, how the floppy diskette worked.
What's inside a processor, what a stack, a register and an accumulator are.

Here's one of those vintage books:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NueRKhEwvY

Business range PC's are more like Apple product then Generic PC's

Companies and System Administrators want something that "just works"
Large OEM's will spend time and money in R&D to confirm a certain combination of parts work well together and don't cause any conflicts.
It's also uncommon for these computers to ever be upgraded.

In the last 10 years I've only ever upgraded RAM, and even this would be on less then 1/2 of the computers I look after.
In the same time I've maybe upgraded a graphics card twice? and HDD replacement 5 times, which includes failed drives.
Only once have in my 20 year career upgraded a CPU for a business, and that was on a CAD dual socket workstation.

Marketing/profits would also come into play.
Just like cars have different trim levels
Intel or whoever will happily CPU/chipset's in the budget range close to cost price with basic functionality, Mid-tier fine for the majority and makes a healthy profit, then Enthusiast that most don't need but damn does it have a high profit margin when it sells!

Everyone else covered the topic well, not much I can add other than you have to look at it from their point of view.

When people say "Why did they do that? It only costs $1 more and would make is so much better!". I would often remind them, that $1 is multiplied out over ten's of thousands of units for them. What's a $1 to you and I is vastly more to the manufacturer. Like others already said, so much when into making these things as cheaply as possible for many reasons.

Also, these things were made for "the masses". They were looked at as general use appliances, and like many other electronics, planned obsolesce was a thing, has been for a long time, and still is today.

Those of us who are not part of "the masses" were never the target demographic. 😀

StriderTR wrote on 2025-04-07, 05:17:

Everyone else covered the topic well, not much I can add other than you have to look at it from their point of view. […]
Show full quote

Everyone else covered the topic well, not much I can add other than you have to look at it from their point of view.

When people say "Why did they do that? It only costs $1 more and would make is so much better!". I would often remind them, that $1 is multiplied out over ten's of thousands of units for them. What's a $1 to you and I is vastly more to the manufacturer. Like others already said, so much when into making these things as cheaply as possible for many reasons.

Also, these things were made for "the masses". They were looked at as general use appliances, and like many other electronics, planned obsolesce was a thing, has been for a long time, and still is today.

Those of us who are not part of "the masses" were never the target demographic. 😀

yes exactly, also we may say "why not add that $1 thing" another might want another $1 thing, soon enough its $10 and then there is another possible addition and the cycle begins again. Soon enough the price point is missed, the units don't sell and everyone complains about prices.

Also, these systems often end up very cheap and can, sometimes, make interesting vintage options where upgrading isn't the aim

Thanks everybody, sounds like this confirms that it is just about tight profit margins and trying to squeeze the most of the consumer (by needing to upgrade)

RubDub2k wrote on 2025-04-10, 04:19:

Thanks everybody, sounds like this confirms that it is just about tight profit margins and trying to squeeze the most of the consumer (by needing to upgrade)

'Needing to upgrade' is not a way to squeeze the consumer, though - I don't think there's enough brand loyalty in consumer PCs that any of the players can assume that once your brand X system hits a dead end and is unupgradable, you will come back and buy another brand X system. Not to mention - they probably make more money selling you one high-end system than selling you two low-end systems so selling you bad systems at cut-throat prices so you'll come back sooner is not a great strategy.

It's more about not spending money on things that consumers in the intended segment don't care about. Look at the enthusiast world - when bad caps were taking out all the enthusiast socket 462 boards, all the MSIs and Gigabytes and Asuses started to advertise 'all Japanese capacitors', etc. Did that up the bill of materials? Sure. But an enthusiast buying a boxed motherboard will pay $10 more for better-quality capacitors, especially when their friend's last board died due to bad capacitors after 18 months. Similarly I'm sure I'm not the only enthusiast who picked a relatively high-end motherboard with lots of expansion and then paired it with a fairly low end CPU for some project or other - a combination that would never exist in the prebuilt retail world.

The general view in consumerland is that people are buying more MHz, more megabytes and more gigabytes. Maybe more inches (but definitely not pixels or, in the CRT days, refresh rates) on the monitor. And then there were the features you had to check off - depending on the times, CD-ROMs, CD burners, modems, etc - but where no one really cares about the details beyond one being there. This is one of the reasons retail systems were very slow to adopt SSDs - they didn't think they could market a 256GB SSD system next to a 2TB HDD-based system at worst buy. This was one of the entire driving propositions of the whole HotBurst debacle - Intel wanted to deliver more GHz at any cost. This is what explains the Quantum Bigfoot hard drives - slow, dated performs, but could deliver more GBs at a price point. This is the reason that to this day, high-end monitors have basically never been sold in a worst buy.

And what you will see, certainly starting in the mid-90s, accelerating in the late-90s with the launch of designated low-end parts like Celerons, Intel on-chipset graphics, mATX cases, etc., and continuing to this day, is a general trend that retail systems try to offer the most MHz and the most megabytes/gigabytes/terabytes at a given price point. Everything else will be as cheapened as humanly possible.