That’s a huge generalization, and it depends what you use your system for. Some people might be on old threadripper workstations that works fine, for instance, and slaps in a second GPU. Or maybe someone needs more cores for work; they can just swap their CPU out. Maybe your 4K gaming system can make do with an older CPU.

I upgraded RAM and storage just before the RAMpocalypse, and that’s not possible on many laptops. And I can stuff a whole bunch of SSDs into the body and use them all at once.

I’d also argue that ATX desktops are more protected from anti-consumer behavior, like soldered price-gouged SSDs, planned obsolescence, or a long list of things you see Apple do.

…That being said, there’s a lot of trends going against people, especially for gaming:

• There’s “initial build FOMO” where buyers max out their platform at the start, even if that’s financially unwise and they miss out on sales/deals.

• We just went from DDR4 to DDR5, on top of some questionable segmentation from AMD/Intel. So yeah, sockets aren’t the longest lived.

• Time gaps between generations are growing as silicon gets more expensive to design.

• …Buyers are collectively stupid and bandwagon. See: the crazy low end Nvidia GPU sales when they have every reason to buy AMD/Intel/used Nvidia instead. So they are rewarding bad behavior from companies.

• Individual parts are more repairable. If my 3090 or mobo dies, for instance, I can send it to a repairperson and have a good chance of saving it.

• You can still keep your PSU, case, CPU heating, storage and such. It’s a drop in the bucket cost-wise, but it’s not nothing.

IMO things would be a lot better if GPUs were socketable, with LPCAMM on a motherboard.