Consumers buy computers generally for the following reasons:
1. The one I have doesn't work well or it broke. I need a new one.
2. I, or the person for whom I am buying it, does not have a computer but wants/needs one.
Those people either go online (using old barely working computer or with their smartphone) and pick out a computer, or they go to Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Staples, or someplace like that and pick out a computer.
They don't know a thing about IPC, clock speed, or anything else. There is sometimes (often?) a helpful infographic in the computer section, almost certainly put there through some marketing agreement between the retailer and Intel, that explains in very simple terms what Celeron, Pentium, Core i3/i5/i7 are, and what you should buy based on your "use case" (these use cases are in very broad terms and would look silly to an enthusiast).
The potential buyer has a certain budget in mind, with perhaps a little bit of wiggle room. Then that person looks at the different computers within his or her price range, and either independently or with the help of a sales rep (who has just enough knowledge to explain in broad terms what the different features/options mean) picks a system that she or he thinks will meet their needs for a while.
That person walks out the door with her or his computer, and probably won't be back to buy another computer for a long time.
If you really want to understand how most people buy computers, just go to the computer section in one of the stores I mentioned above, and ask a sales rep to help you pick out a computer. Tell him/her what you want to use it for, how much you're willing to spend, etc. and watch the process unfold.
It's frustrating, but it's so true.
I had a friend of a friend buy a brand-new PC at BestBuy, for like $700 or $900 or something. It wasn't a
bad PC, but like most OEM-built PCs (other than Microcenter's), it wasn't "well rounded". He bought it for gaming, and I think got an i7, but then was using it for gaming
with the HD4600 iGPU. Gah! Who does serious online gaming,
without a GPU?!?!. Anyways, he doesn't really talk to his friends after he got a GF, but I was going to offer him one of my older half-decent GPUs for free, for a Christmas present one year, just so that he could see what he was missing, and maybe buy an updated GPU in the future.
I've got another friend, whom I helped build (for a price) a PC, and then continued to soup it up (for him, and for me, to do DC for me one Winter season). He started with an AM2+ ASRock mobo, a low-power AM2 dual-core, 2x2GB DDR2-800, and onboard HD3000 chipset IGP video. Eventually, I helped him out with an Athlon II X4 CPU, some 4x4GB "Chinese DDR2" I picked up cheap on ebay, and a few SSDs (over the years), and a retail upgrade copy of Windows 7, because he had been on XP, with an old HDD.
It's far from a
bad rig, with a quad-core, 16GB of RAM, and a 120GB SSD with Win7 64-bit. But he complains about it every once in a while, and I would like to throw in an Intel rig with higher IPC and clocks for him, if he could at least make some sort of token payment to defer some of my expenses on the parts. I was thinking, New Kaby Lake G4560 3.5Ghz w/HT, or G4600 3.6Ghz w/HT and HD630 (have one incoming), Asus H110M-A/M.2 (already have), 2x8GB DDR4-2400 (already have), and maybe a PCI-E M.2 SSD, if he's willing to spring for something that pricy. Otherwise, I would throw in a new 240GB 2.5" SATA SSD out of my SSD stockpiles. (Don't have any spare new larger ones.) Then, either transfer the Win7 64-bit license over, or possibly install Win10 64-bit, and use the Win7 license key to activate on new hardware. (Probably the best choice.)
But part of me, wonders if maybe he shouldn't just go out and buy a Skylake / Kaby Lake i3 pre-built, and be done with it.