People endlessly rant about memory prices, the enslopification of Windows, GPU manufacturers shifting away from their "gamer" demographics, and other AI-related doomer issues that certainly are all bad things. However, to me, all of these issues seem to pale in comparison to something a little more tangible, for those of us who bought RAM before the RAM-pocalypse began last year. Now, this may seem a little stupid, but as already stated in the title, it's cable management. Allow me to explain.
What makes a bigger impact into your daily life? The cleanliness of your home, or copilot coming preinstalled into your PC? I'm going to guess that you would answer with the former. Point being that there are too many people with an ungodly mess of cables under their desk, and actually throughout their entire homes, who can't do anything about it. Now, this being a problem is dependant on whether people care that it's there in the first place, but I'm just going to go ahead and say this straight up: If having a wild cable ecosystem anywhere in your vicinity doesn't hurt your soul, then you don't deserve the life so graciously given to you. Yeah that's right.
Seriously though, for me, and I believe for many, many other people, having horrifying amounts of cable-clutter is pure suffering. That's why I spend hours of my life neatly tying cables up, 3D printing custom cable boxes, drilling holes in my desk, and generally attempting to hide as many of those damn wires as possible. After all that effort, I live a relatively tranquil life - rarely do my eyes set upon the horror of an unmanaged connector. They all have been strapped up neatly in rows, out of sight. So then on my end, the problem doesn't exist at all. I was more than happy to devote time and effort towards this. The real issue starts only when we peek into the lives of the less technically capable and motivated (Yeah I'm calling myself technically capable, what are you gonna do about it). It's likely that millions of people are casually creating lovecraftian entities under their desks simply because there is no fix available to them. To be frank, despite my earlier exclamations about blah blah you deserve to die for having cable clutter, it's the sad reality that a lot of those people really aren't bothered by it, at least not as much as I am. But this still doesn't make it a non-issue to me, because it then causes this central facet of modern life, the computer, to exist in peoples homes in a haphazard, macgyvered kind of way - it's as if the actual placement of personal computing setups in living spaces was never given any serious thought beyond "it can sit on a desk" - engineers and designers for the past 30 years haven't once had it occur to them that maybe they shouldn't try and stuff the square down the circle hole, to make a metaphor of it.
So to clarify, what makes me mad here is that desktop computers don't even pretend to care about what happens to the cables plugged into them. They have ports for them, and that's it. We've never moved beyond "thick plastic cable go from one black box to another, and what happen to rest of cable? I dunno, not my department". THINGS SHOULDN'T BE LIKE THAT, RAHHHHH! Obviously, laptops and unibody/integrated machines like the iMac exist that do mitigate these problems , but neither of those are in the true spirit of classic desktop computing. As in a tower and a monitor. And besides, I see cable nightmares under desks hosting laptops all the time, because people want speakers, and a second monitor, and their charger(s), and a stream deck, and a DAC, and a dock for their fuckin iPod video. And unless the person responsible for said nightmare cares, said nightmare will remain.
This might just be unsolvable.
I don't even know what the fuck I'm talking about anymore. At this point it feels like I'm just describing a basic reality of life - messes exist where no one bothers to take care of them. But still... it feels like a real solution must be possible. One that doesn't require consumers to spend 70 dollars on random little cable trays and ties and whatnot just so it doesn't look like a mutant spider colony has taken up residence under their setup. Maybe it's possible... and maybe it isn't. Even Apple, with their minimalist, zen design philosophy and their careful attention to the subtleties of the user experience and it's complete cohesiveness, seemingly can't do anything to prevent an unwieldy, half inch thick HDMI cable from ruining a customers ultra clean setup.
Maybe the real solution is for everyone to just use those "PC in a desk" things that a few different youtubers have made. Lmao