Sure there is. It should be affordable and do the job you expect it to do.
But that's the point I was making: people's expectations aren't static. They change, and that's influenced by what's available.
Now, you could say that you're happy with the applications and operating system you're currently using and don't see any reason to change, and you're happy to turtle shell yourself while the rest of the world moves on, but then you're no longer talking about the average user. You're ignoring that the average user cares about their computing experience being as simple and trouble-free as possible, and a large social aspect of that is interoperability with what everyone else is using.
Let's say you buy a good modern machine now and decide to stick with it. Now, fast forward 20 years. Other users, whether they really needed to or not, bought the newest machines (because, why not, and because 20 year's worth of teenagers got a new computer when they started college), and along with them came new versions of software and new industry standards. All your applications run just as fast as they did 20 years before[sup]*[/sup], but support for your version of Windows was finally ended 5 years ago, and since then there haven't been any updates or security fixes. Whenever someone emails you a Word document, they have to make it "Office 2010 compatible". Half the time, they forget. USB has become obsolete - new computers don't use it, so you can't casually give someone your USB key. You have to give them the key and some quaint USB-to-whatever adapter you bought ten years ago. Let's say your hard disk or DVD drive breaks down. You can't easily get a replacement, because the bus standard has changed and manufacturers are all building for the new one. Then you walk into Walmart and see a new, modern system going for just $300. With the new system, the increasing number of workarounds you've been having to live with would all go away instantly. What do you think the average user would do in that situation?
[sup]*[/sup]Windows has this nuisance that the registry becomes increasingly cluttered over time, which slows down the whole system. From what I hear, keeping a Windows machine running as fast as new often means periodically reinstalling the whole system or carefully limiting the number of applications you install and remove.
and should have enough all kind of connection ports on it, so you can hook it up to this and that.
But there's a problem here: the kind really matters, and that's a standard that changes with time. One of the things that makes a 20 year old computer near useless to the average user is that of its 2 or 3 ports, exactly zero of them are USB.
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Look it up.
For the record, I've used a Tatung Einstein. (Then again, I was about 7, and it was basically a toy.) I don't think the thing even had a hard disk.
But even in the late 90s, computers sucked big time, they were slow, the internet was slow, connection ports were missing, HD space was expensive, monitors were bulky, batteries died in 1-2 hours, RAM was expensive,etc...
They suck
in retrospect. They look pretty damn miraculous if you compare them with what was available in the 80s. And back in the 80s, simply being able to own a microcomputer and use it at your desk at home looks pretty miraculous compared with the minicomputers of the 70s.
I was actually using a mid-90s computer (Windows 95, 100 MHz Pentium, 16 MB RAM, 500 or so MB hard drive) for a time. The main reasons I thought it sucked all had to do with that time being the early 2000s. In fact, my biggest annoyance was with the hard drive capacity, which I think was quite small even by mid-90s standards.
