Wow, the interesting part there—at least for anyone who already knows the cabinet story—is how it ends:
"Well, that was a difficult part to layout because of the memory bus.", Burrell responded. "If we change it, it might not work as well electrically".
"OK, I'll tell you what," said Steve. "Let's do another layout to make the board prettier, but if it doesn't work as well, we'll change it back."
So we invested another $5,000 or so to make a few boards with a new layout that routed the memory bus in a Steve-approved fashion. But sure enough, the new boards didn't work properly, as Burrell had predicted, so we switched back to the old design for the next run of prototypes.
That's interesting because (a) it's a story of how the cabinet principle didn't prevail, and (b) it's a brilliant example of how to communicate.
The best-looking cabinet you can make that stays up is more beautiful than a beautiful back wall that collapses.
More cynically, these stories are also a way for Steve Jobs, who lacks technical skill but is still the boss of the technical geniouses, carves out a niche for himself where he is the undisputed leader and no oen can challenge him: his own subjective sense of aesthetic.
There was a similar story where he insisted on painting manufacturing machines for aesthetic reasons. It cost a lot of money, the paint caused problems with the machines, and the stuff they were manufacturing didn't sell well. I think I heard it in the Isaacson book, but here's a site telling the same story. https://professornerdster.com/from-steve-jobs-life-a-clean-f...
I had a job wire-wrapping circuit boards in college.
I expended effort to lay out the wires so they formed a neat pattern. Why spend time doing that? It made it easy to check for errors in wiring, as then the pattern would be disrupted. The end result was I almost never made a wirewrap mistake, and the work was appreciated.
I also soldered components on, and also took care to orient the resisters all the same way, and align everything neatly. I'd use needle nose pliers to bend the leads just so, too. It also made visual error checking fast and easy. Again, no errors.
I dunno man, Apple's PCB designs are incredibly space efficient. Compare the sandwich PCB of a modern iPhone against the main board of something like a Samsung Galaxy. Apple is sweating out every cubic millimetre it can, while Samsung is perfectly fine with a load of empty green PCB all over the place.
Does discrete circuit density correlate with engineering quality somehow? Are we back around to the parable of Master Foo and the Hardware Designer in the year of our lord and savior 2025?
Apple definitely refurbs boards. They just don't do it in the back of an Apple Store. It's far more economical for them to do full logic board swaps (or other components) than spend the time and effort doing component level repairs in the back of a retail store.
How do normal people walk? Are people diagnosed as normal? Do autistic people receive a comprehensive list of things they do that are not normal and instructions of how to be normal?
I think human gaits are unexamined compared to, say, horses, which are very high performance movers that are vulnerable to problems, have to carry extra weight, and for whom the main reason we have them is their walking/trotting/cantering performance.
My impression from people watching 20-year old undergraduate students at my Uni is that a lot of them have gaits that seem markedly abnormal to me, like there is a strong left/right asymmetry or their toes are not pointing in the right direction or something. My impression is that general populations of people in a wider age range seem to have better gaits, I don't know if people improve their form with time or if the people with bad gaits aren't walking in public when they're in an environment where they don't have to or have it damage their mobility.
Facebook puts scam ads in the feed for all kinds of products. You can report them but, it continues, different accounts, same scams. There's no control over the junk in the feed.
The bouncy animation and scaling UI seems like it will make multi-tasking more difficult. I want to be able to navigate apps one handed with a fraction of my attention.
