On the market for assembled desktops, laptops and phones.
I am currently on my third laptop in 8 years. The one I have currently is pretty powerful but the last two weren't as powerful as I wished. They didn't have a dedicated GPU. They didn't have SSDs. Their CPUs were a generation old. Don't get me wrong, they were still very helpful, especially given that most of my time was spent programming and running long-running simulations. But, I would've loved to be able to swap out the CPU or the SSD on my old laptop, instead of having to throw it away and buy a new one.
If I had a desktop, instead of a laptop, throwing the old out and replacing them with the new might have been easier. There are a number of people who still prefer assembling their desktop from scratch. And there are businesses that cater specifically to these customers. The good thing about assembling your own desktop, as I mentioned earlier, is the fact that you can swap out the old CPU/GPU with the new ones and replace the existing magnetic hard drive with a flashy SSD. But, they are obviously not portable. Having two desktops, one at work and another at home, is a little costly. There are ways to sync the two but it'll take a little bit of effort. And, you wont be able to work when you're traveling. Let me not talk about the merits of using a laptop/desktop, all of us have our own opinions.
Coming to the point, I wanted to see how easy it was to assemble my own desktop. So, I searched for such services on Google (the specific phrase being "make your own desktop service india") and I came across this answer (https://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-custom-build-my-PC-in-India), from April 2016, stating that there weren't any services in India where you could assemble your own PC and have it delivered. Which seems to be mostly true. There are a few international services which allow you to build your own PC but none Indian.
http://assembleyourpc.net/ looks the cleanest of them all but it doesn't assemble desktops for you and it needs you to order the items from Flipkart/Amazon/other by yourself. And assemble the desktop yourself.
https://originpc.asia/in/en/Configuration/Neuron is overkill. It's not based in India but they ship here nevertheless. But their selection/customization/build process seems like overkill. Which is the same story with https://www.pugetsystems.com/nav/deluge/A2/customize.php. And https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/computers/intel-z270-pc/.
The clunkiest of them all, but the only one based in India, seems to be https://www.rigassembler.com/pages/build, where I had to select and move individual items into the Cart.
A few of the above mentioned businesses also provide assembled laptops but again, they're not based in India. And getting replacement parts or trying to upgrade the laptop with the latest CPU/GPU/others is going to take time and a lot of money.
I don't understand why though. I don't understand why the creation part of customization has to be as clunky as the above websites made it out to be. And I don't understand why there aren't businesses catering to assembled laptops. While a few laptop manufacturers, like Dell, allow you to upgrade hardware, it comes at a hefty price.
Coming to phones that can be assembled and upgraded on the fly, Project Ara (https://atap.google.com/ara/) might come to mind. But it might not see the light of day anytime soon. I think there's a huge need for upgradable phones, especially in developing countries. It's quite common for people in developing countries to do one of two things - buy a good phone and live with it for half-a-decade or more or buy a cheap phone with good specs and replace it within an year. Phones that can be upgraded will find some middle ground here.
There's another interesting observation here. For the most part, Apple's products have one major flaw, they are built well and built to last. This might be good for the consumer but bad for the company. This, I expect, is one of the reasons why Apple has an iPhone upgrade program (http://www.apple.com/shop/iphone/iphone-upgrade-program) - because they want to keep selling new versions of the same product and make more money every year. A company which makes phones that can be assembled and upgraded easily will face a similar problem - they can't have a diverse product line, maybe 3 product categories at the most and their source of revenue will have to be from the components that make up the phones instead of the phones themselves.
Maybe one weekend, I will make a website that will be the smoothest way to assemble a desktop. And maybe a(n) (Indian) phone company will come up with a radical new design that will have upgradability as it's central driving factor. Or maybe I'll be able to.
Or, maybe such a service exists and I just haven't found it. If you know of any such services, that assemble laptops or desktops, do tell me. Until then ...
If I had a desktop, instead of a laptop, throwing the old out and replacing them with the new might have been easier. There are a number of people who still prefer assembling their desktop from scratch. And there are businesses that cater specifically to these customers. The good thing about assembling your own desktop, as I mentioned earlier, is the fact that you can swap out the old CPU/GPU with the new ones and replace the existing magnetic hard drive with a flashy SSD. But, they are obviously not portable. Having two desktops, one at work and another at home, is a little costly. There are ways to sync the two but it'll take a little bit of effort. And, you wont be able to work when you're traveling. Let me not talk about the merits of using a laptop/desktop, all of us have our own opinions.
Coming to the point, I wanted to see how easy it was to assemble my own desktop. So, I searched for such services on Google (the specific phrase being "make your own desktop service india") and I came across this answer (https://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-custom-build-my-PC-in-India), from April 2016, stating that there weren't any services in India where you could assemble your own PC and have it delivered. Which seems to be mostly true. There are a few international services which allow you to build your own PC but none Indian.
http://assembleyourpc.net/ looks the cleanest of them all but it doesn't assemble desktops for you and it needs you to order the items from Flipkart/Amazon/other by yourself. And assemble the desktop yourself.
https://originpc.asia/in/en/Configuration/Neuron is overkill. It's not based in India but they ship here nevertheless. But their selection/customization/build process seems like overkill. Which is the same story with https://www.pugetsystems.com/nav/deluge/A2/customize.php. And https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/computers/intel-z270-pc/.
The clunkiest of them all, but the only one based in India, seems to be https://www.rigassembler.com/pages/build, where I had to select and move individual items into the Cart.
A few of the above mentioned businesses also provide assembled laptops but again, they're not based in India. And getting replacement parts or trying to upgrade the laptop with the latest CPU/GPU/others is going to take time and a lot of money.
I don't understand why though. I don't understand why the creation part of customization has to be as clunky as the above websites made it out to be. And I don't understand why there aren't businesses catering to assembled laptops. While a few laptop manufacturers, like Dell, allow you to upgrade hardware, it comes at a hefty price.
Coming to phones that can be assembled and upgraded on the fly, Project Ara (https://atap.google.com/ara/) might come to mind. But it might not see the light of day anytime soon. I think there's a huge need for upgradable phones, especially in developing countries. It's quite common for people in developing countries to do one of two things - buy a good phone and live with it for half-a-decade or more or buy a cheap phone with good specs and replace it within an year. Phones that can be upgraded will find some middle ground here.
There's another interesting observation here. For the most part, Apple's products have one major flaw, they are built well and built to last. This might be good for the consumer but bad for the company. This, I expect, is one of the reasons why Apple has an iPhone upgrade program (http://www.apple.com/shop/iphone/iphone-upgrade-program) - because they want to keep selling new versions of the same product and make more money every year. A company which makes phones that can be assembled and upgraded easily will face a similar problem - they can't have a diverse product line, maybe 3 product categories at the most and their source of revenue will have to be from the components that make up the phones instead of the phones themselves.
Maybe one weekend, I will make a website that will be the smoothest way to assemble a desktop. And maybe a(n) (Indian) phone company will come up with a radical new design that will have upgradability as it's central driving factor. Or maybe I'll be able to.
Or, maybe such a service exists and I just haven't found it. If you know of any such services, that assemble laptops or desktops, do tell me. Until then ...