BWHAHAHAHAHAA. You really have no ****ing idea!! 20 Minutes to change a chip
on a motherboard!!!! You can't be serious. It could *easily* take weeks of
man time just to work out which chip they want to use. It could *easily*
takes hours of management time just to work out that they want to change the
chip.
They already have the basic reference design and it only
needs massaged to fit. This is within context of what had
been written, changing one sound chip for another. The
vast majority of the supporting components are in the
immediate vicinity, on the reference design, and most sound
chips are not much different in side, it would simply be
rotated to facilitate easiest routing to the power, output
jacks and signal.
You might just be surprised how similar different sound
chips are, most of the differences these days are internal,
not layout related.
I've never designed mothboards but I have done electronic design and I have
worked for manufacturers as a qualified mechanical engineer. Just changing
the smallest part required huge amounts of effort.
Perhaps you were'nt using today's software to do it?
Keep in mind we are not taking about "from scratch" here,
there's an existing design that only needs modified. The
different component takes up roughly the same space on the
board and has similar needs as it is performing same
function (overall).
One project I worked on
they had a hose in a dishwasher that rose about 6 inches and then went back
down 6 inches and out the back of the dishwasher. They wanted me to
investigate removing the kink. I had to set up all sorts of tests to see
what would happen if it was removed and it took weeks of work. Everything
had to be documented and after 4 weeks I gave them my report and they
decided not to change it.
Sounds more difficult than swapping a chip, might be
compared to looking through a parts list for an alternate
piece of cabling that drops into same place, not another
place. Manufacturers are not shuffling around a whole board
to swap a sound chip, it'll go where the other one did or
where they have left space for one if there wasn't any.
If they had changed it there would have been weeks
more of work involved in changing the production line, finding a shorter
hose, training staff, altering repair manuals. They'd also needed to have
kept 2 parts in stock and updated parts database plus a whole lot of stuff I
wouldn't even know about. It would be very easy to look at it from the
outside and just say "oh yeah, they straightened the hose, must have taken
10 minutes". I know a lot of that crap wouldn't apply to motherboards but
literally hundreds even thousands of other issues would.
I can appreciate your perspective, but there are
differences. Modern motherboard design is automated and
pretty much cut-n-paste. Consider that when you did your
job on the hose rerouting, if all you'd had to do was pick
from 5 pre-made designs, cut and paste it into the
engineering schematics and all of those designs had already
been pre-qualified, you wouldn't have had to do it.
What you are describing is work done pre-integration, not at
the time a motherboard is changed. If you want to count that
as # of man-hours, you have a point, though these works are
done to facilitate widespread use, a manufacturer does not
typically use a different sound chip on every board so once
this work is done (reference design is almost always
provided by the chip manufacturer, not developed by the
motherboard manufacturer) the only remaining steps are
adaptation if necessary. Modern motherboards are modular to
a large degree, at least till you start shrinking them to be
mATX.
