To be honest, the case is still the original one, but almost every other part has since been replaced. Now, I’ve taken it back to the shop where I bought it 20 years ago and asked them to upgrade the motherboard, CPU, and memory - the last of the original parts.

So, is it still the same computer?

I also like that I can just keep replacing parts on an existing product rather than buying an entirely new device each time. That’s exceedingly rare feature these days.

    • ContrarianTrail@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      Yeah, the question would rather be ‘when does it stop being the same thing?’ It quite obviously no longer is if every single part has been replaced.

      Also, depends on what one means by ‘the same computer.’ The computer I’ve been using for the past several years mostly still remains. Some of the parts have been replaced a long time ago of which few have been there longer than the original.

        • ContrarianTrail@lemm.eeOPEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          I honestly don’t remember the exact details. I haven’t gotten it back from the shop yet, and they didn’t give me a parts list with me. Since it’s not my area of expertise, I just trusted their judgment on the parts. My budget was around 350 euros. I use a MacBook as my daily driver, and this PC is just for occasionally playing 10-year-old games. My main goal was to regain upgradeability with the motherboard swap, as my current one didn’t support modern components. Atleast RAM.

          As far as I recall, the motherboard was an ASUS TUF Gaming something, with an Intel i5 processor and 16GB of RAM. I upgraded the GPU a few years back to an Nvidia GTX1660S

    • taiyang@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      I think that logic actually doesn’t hold up, perhaps because when a new piece is added, the PCs identity slowly changes. New pieces since it becomes part of the definition of what that computer is.

      Let’s take the idea of adding a new piece, say a secondary drive. Does that make the computer a new computer? Of course not, that drive belongs to the whole. Does it make it 6/5? Technically not, since you’re just counting the original pieces… even if said drive becomes integral to your PC by hosting you Linux distro you migrate to.

      Years pass, parts fail, and that Linux instance persists. Now you’re down to 0/5 but somewhere along the way your PC of Thesius changed along with it’s parts. Using that old definition makes no sense anymore. In fact, it never did. Some say it changed the night you learned about Arch Linux on Lemmy. Others say it changed when you left your Windows loving wife over her poor taste in OS.

      I… may have lost my train of thought. I guess all this is to say you can argue definitions all you want but there isn’t a mathematical solution when we’re taking about stuff like identity, definitions, etc… but to be fair, it’s a thought experiment, not meant to be solved so much as a way to provoke critical thinking.