Are the days of tinkering over?

We don't tinker and customize like we used to. In the 70s and 80s and long before that, we were tinkering and customizing vehicles. Better manifolds, better carburetors, bigger engines, high performance transmissions, better shocks and springs. Guys learned how to strip their engines, blueprint them and put them back together. Not so much anymore. Most of the customization that is done to cars nowadays is purely aesthetic. Ridiculous spoilers, loud mufflers, and fancy wheels and lights. The only performance enhancements are typically limited to custom computer chips.

The same situation exists for computers. There was a time, although it was mostly due to necessity, that we spent hours excruciatingly customizing our computer systems memory allocation, and other tweaks to squeeze out every last ounce of performance. Not anymore. The only people who tend to obsess about their computer performance these days are the serious gamers. Otherwise, conversations about tweaking memory allocation, overclocking, or the efficiency and performance of the pipelining in the graphics card are lost on most computer users.

When I was a kid, most guys knew what the inside of a radio or amplifier or computer looks like. I don't think that's true anymore.