Hello. Many of the older thinkpads were regarded as being peak for the ability to repair and easily see into them at both the hardware and software levels.
I was wondering, what PC, if any, is similar in this regard? Aside from building your own PC ofc. Any opinions are welcome. Thank you.
I don’t think you understand the problem. The power supply Dell included with their standard Xeon wasn’t regular ATX so it couldn’t work with a regular GPU. I replaced the 10 year old Dell power supply with a 15 year old standard ATX.
Buying unsupported hardware to make it work and dremeling the case wasn’t your original claim that Dell etc are an easy phone call to upgrade your PC. They absolutely will not upgrade it.
The OP didn’t make any reference to their buying a PC for a large corporation. So extolling the large corporate benefits of support contracts isn’t relevant. For a user without a support contract, a regular PC will be easier and cheaper to maintain.
Edit referencing your car analogy:
If every other car manufacturer let you drop in an engine from any other car without even buying a different screw except BMW, everyone would rightly criticize BMW for being proprietary.
Regular PC’s, which makes up around 70% of the desktop PC market, are completely interchangeable right down to the screw sizes. It’s only Dell/HP/Lenovo that are a minority of the desktop PC market and are incompatible.