He asked about they cultural aspects of this. To a person from Poland, as he said he was, it didn't make sense.
When trying to explain things you have to try think like a Martian (or a Nobel prize winning physicist.)
In short try and stand outside the system you are studying. To a person not from North America it can look really strange that Wal-Mart selling PC's was a big deal. while Best Buy selling a crummy pc never got a peep. (Look it up Best Buy sells /sold it's own brand of windows tablet for years never saw a review anywhere.)
Wal-Mart clearly holds a special place in our hearts in the US and it's 10 future states also known as Canada.
Ok, lets be realistic here for a second and stop looking at the system from our nerdy perspective, shall we?
Would the kind of person who buys a pre-built system in a supermarket store like Walmart really care about frame times, what kind of motherboard is inside and that case has only USB 2.0 ports in the front? Of course not. All they will care is if the system can generally run latest games smoothly. To which, the answer is yes. Again, don't forget that majority of people buying these are not nitpicky like us who notice every tiny stutter or refresh rate issue just by looking at the image. I've seen several casual users who were playing games with really bad framerate and it was like totally a OK for them while it was literally painful for me to play it. So, these are the kind of people using such systems.
Realistically, only major cockup was the unplugged PCIe power which I think is a HUGE problem. For us it's a 10 second fix. For a casual consumer it's a non functional computer. Otherwise they'd build one by themselves.
Also, I think single channel memory was a dumb decision from performance perspective. People like this don't care about upgradability (they usually run system till it's so old they replace it entirely), it should have come with 2x8GB RAM in dual channel. But I think they used single stick because it's easier to assemble. It's why they do the same shit in laptops.
So, realistically, only REAL issue with the system was the unplugged PCIe power cable which is hopefully just an isolated case. Single channel RAM and restricted airflow are just minor inconveniences and are pretty much irrelevant for casual consumers.
If they addressed the airflow and dual channel memory with maybe USB 3.0 on the front IO, I think the system would be something to shortlist. Now it's just worthy of consideration as pre-built for a casual consumer as it's not absolutely terrible and/or overpriced.
