Okay so I’m using this perfectly fine article as an excuse to bring something up, so bear with me here.

If you haven’t been paying attention to the PC world lately, you might not have noticed that the lowly PC has seen a bit of a resurgence, with interesting designs and unique concepts. We saw this come to bear at CES just a couple of months ago, where PC makers such as Dell, Lenovo, and HP all trotted out interesting laptop designs. But the laptop isn’t the only PC that’s seen a design-focused revival. The lowly desktop PC has transformed from a boring beige or black box into a centerpiece of a modern desk space. An all-in-one computer in 2017 is both functional as a computer and beautiful to appreciate as a piece of design.

This is only slightly related, but it’s something that has been bugging me for years, and since I was confronted with it again this past weekend, I might as well get it out of my system: why is nobody innovating anymore in the field of building your own computer? So many aspects of building your own computer are completely crazy when you think about it, and it seems like nobody is really doing anything to fix them.

For instance, why haven’t we come up with a way to increase the power you can draw from a PCI-E slot, so that graphics cards don’t have to be plugged into the PSU directly with unwieldy power cables, with connectors in the most boneheaded location on the graphics card?

Why are we still using those horrible internal 9/10-pin connectors for USB, the front panel, audio, and so on? These are absolutely dreadful connectors, spread out all over the motherboard in illogical places forcing you to route cabling in unnatural ways, and the pins can easily bend. This is terrible 80s technology that we should’ve fixed by now.

And the most idiotic connector of them all, which is huge, stiff, almost impossible to plug in, remove, or route properly: the ATX power plug from the PSU to the motherboard. This thing is probably one of the worst connectors you can possibly find inside any computer, and the slot on the motherboard is in an incredibly illogical place considering most case layouts. To make matters worse, the CPU power connector sits at the top-left (usually) of the motherboard, so that’s another unwieldy connector and cable with an unnatural route that you have to deal with. It’s just terrible.

I like the inside of my computer to look as neat and tidy as possible – not only because it looks nice and is easier to clean, but also because it improves airflow, something quite important with today’s processors and graphics cards. However, aging standards with terrible designs and horrible usability that wouldn’t look out of place in a 1960s mainframe make that quite the challenge.

We’ve seen some minor improvements already these past ten years or so, with the advent of modular PSUs and the death of the dreadfully terrible IDE cables and Molex connectors, but more work is definitely needed. We need a replacement for the aging ATX standard, which delivers enough power to the motherboard for the board itself, video cards, and the processors and fans, through a single cable with a modern, easy-to-use connector. It’d be great if a replacement for SATA could also carry power, so that we no longer need to route individual power cables to our hard drives. We need to get rid of 9/10-pin connectors for things like USB and the front panel, and replace them with easy-to-use USB-like connectors.

And last but certainly not least: put all of these things in locations that make sense for the vast majority of cases in use today, so we can reduce the length of cables, save money in the process, and end up with cleaner, easier-to-use computers.

Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, case makers, Microsoft, and whomever else is involved here – sit around a damn table for once, and hash this stuff out. ATX is outdated garbage, and needs a modern replacement. ATX was introduced in 1995 – do you still want to use Windows 95? OS/2 Warp? Version 1.2.0 of the Linux kernel? System 7.5.1? Floppies? CRTs? Of course you don’t!

Then why the hell are we still using ATX?