It's quite clar that these days PC gamers are of the opinion that a PC is just a form of more powerful console, and that the old compatibility and configuration problems are long gone. It's also quite clear that this is not actually the case at all. If you buy a PC you're not just buying something that is more powerful than a console, you are also buying something that will give you trouble at some time in the future.
I guess users of today are used
to use hardware that actually works as more and more people move away from the good old configurable pc to notebooks, netbooks and smartphones which have a fixed hardware and therefore are more reliable.
The software you use on the latter will more likely work as those types of hardware (especially smartphones) have the same advantage as consoles have.
A more unified hardware architecture worldwide.
The pc also suffers from the attempt to make it easier to handle by reducing the need for in depth hardware knowledge moving all the responisbility for a reliable system from users to the programmer. You'll remember that we had that topic before.
In my opinion, the pc doesn't work that way. PCs are more like classic cars that are kept alive by stuffing them up with modern parts.
It just doesn't work. If a system is completely configurable, it needs to be simple.
PCs over the last 20 years worked pretty well as most of the technology stayed rather simple and the math power advantage was achieved by brute force, like raising clock speeds and adding memory. As we know, raising clock speeds is not really an option anymore since the good old silicon won't let us do so and energy consumption is becoming a serious problem.
The configurability always comes at the expense of speed and reliability so the usual pc related problems are more obvious today than they were 20 years ago when users were accustomed to do everything by themselves.
» Wed May 16, 2012 1:50 am 
