Having done the process a few times over the last, oh, two decades, I can say that some things have gotten easier while others have gotten a bit worse.
Assembly a PC is pretty easy these days, most of the parts go together pretty easily, and your chances of everything working on the first try are pretty high. This is way different from ye olden days when it might take hours just to get a PC put together correctly unless you were lucky, hardware is a lot less fiddly these days than it used to be.
But buying all the components for a PC is more challenging for novices. This can be hard for techies to understand because we just assume that everyone knows what we know. But your J. Average prospective computer building may not know whether a Core i7 8700 is better than a Core 2 Quad or vice versa. They also may not know what the heck an 8th generation Core i7 is. There are so many generations of components now and so many gradations within each generation that it can become and informational overload. If you try to go at the problem directly by just heading to newegg or amazon and browsing for parts without doing the research you're going to have a bad time.
There are a zillion different socket formats, there are a zillion different motherboard form factors, there are a zillion different GPU lines and each one has a zillion different variations. How do you know which are compatible? How do you know which ones are the best? Or just the best for the price? Are higher numbers better? Worse? Not important? Is LGA 2066 better than LGA 1151? Is a GeForce 9800 better than a GTX 1080? There are a zillion of these little questions. Already knowing most of the answers makes navigating the problem vastly easier, having to find an answer for each and every one of them can be exhausting. You absolutely need some sort of guide or hand holding to get started on this problem from scratch but if you don't have any pre-existing knowledge you don't know where to go. (Personally, my favorite is http://www.logicalincrements.com but there are others.) You need someone to help you narrow the scope of the decision problem to a manageable level, otherwise you'll drown in choices and questions until you run out of will power to continue.
Assembly a PC is pretty easy these days, most of the parts go together pretty easily, and your chances of everything working on the first try are pretty high. This is way different from ye olden days when it might take hours just to get a PC put together correctly unless you were lucky, hardware is a lot less fiddly these days than it used to be.
But buying all the components for a PC is more challenging for novices. This can be hard for techies to understand because we just assume that everyone knows what we know. But your J. Average prospective computer building may not know whether a Core i7 8700 is better than a Core 2 Quad or vice versa. They also may not know what the heck an 8th generation Core i7 is. There are so many generations of components now and so many gradations within each generation that it can become and informational overload. If you try to go at the problem directly by just heading to newegg or amazon and browsing for parts without doing the research you're going to have a bad time.
There are a zillion different socket formats, there are a zillion different motherboard form factors, there are a zillion different GPU lines and each one has a zillion different variations. How do you know which are compatible? How do you know which ones are the best? Or just the best for the price? Are higher numbers better? Worse? Not important? Is LGA 2066 better than LGA 1151? Is a GeForce 9800 better than a GTX 1080? There are a zillion of these little questions. Already knowing most of the answers makes navigating the problem vastly easier, having to find an answer for each and every one of them can be exhausting. You absolutely need some sort of guide or hand holding to get started on this problem from scratch but if you don't have any pre-existing knowledge you don't know where to go. (Personally, my favorite is http://www.logicalincrements.com but there are others.) You need someone to help you narrow the scope of the decision problem to a manageable level, otherwise you'll drown in choices and questions until you run out of will power to continue.