The other day I found a Gamer's Nexus video in my subscription feed. It was Steve Burke criticizing a magazine's article on how PC building is "hard" and to prove it wasn't, would do a speed build.

Admittedly I didn't watch the whole video, nor did I read the article in question. But my overall takeaway is this: to all you people who build or built their machines, stop saying it's easy as if building a PC is like operating an elevator or using a phone.

Now ignoring the other aspects of building a PC that conveniently get ignored, like identifying your needs, planning your budget, researching parts, testing, and if needed, troubleshooting, of course it's easy to build a PC if you've done it before. But to a fresh newbie, it still may be a nervous experience that really isn't all that easy for them.

To put in another way, I think about the time I was leaning how to ride a motorcycle vs when I ride now. I was nervous about shifting gears around except up when accelerating and down when coming to a stop, I had trouble with the clutch, hills were a problem, going down even past 45 MPH scared me, lane splitting was something I dared not to do with moving traffic.

Now, all of that no longer matters. I can shift just by my gut feeling. I have competent control of the clutch. I can manage most hills (though I'm sure San Francisco will humble me in a second). Highway speeds feel normal. I even lane split in moving traffic (and I survived LA).

These are all more or less "natural" to me. I don't have to think about how to do the action, but merely when to do it. So riding a motorcycle is easy to me. I think it's easy. But it's not.

Granted building a PC isn't this complex, risky, or what have you, but I wanted to illustrate a point. I'm sure most of you who built their own PC consulted the internet a few dozen times throughout each step of the process. I'm sure you spent a lot of time mulling over what's good for you or what's not. Or maybe you didn't and just copied someone else's build (though I'd argue you're sort of cheating). I'm sure when something went wrong, you nearly needed a change of underwear or blew a few blood vessels.

If PC building were really easy for anyone, nobody would need to do or worry about any of this.