Re: Carvin X60-A: Screamin' POS

I feel for you, dude. I would have been tearing my hair out, myself,
especially after discovering that missing pin.

There seems to be a trend towards cruelty in electronics design. Take
the humble, common, yet pricey accessory of professionals everywhere,
the laptop computer. Never mind that, to believe the prognosticators,
we'd all have $100 laptops by now. We ain't got flying cars either.
But look at how laptops die. Some office guy is happily taking notes
on his laptop, with it discreetly plugged into the wall via wart as
the battery hasn't always the lifespan to survive a long meeting.
Some other guy or gal needs to use the bathroom, and trips over the
cord, and disaster! Little bit of shear force applied to the power
connector on the laptop and it's walking dead but nobody knows it
yet. The power connector becomes intermittent, it won't charge, the
machine is also crashy, and perhaps the machine ends up in the hands
of the local nerd with the request - fix it! Only the power connector
was soldered right onto the 8- or 16- layer motherboard PCB, and
there's cracks radiating out from the pins, and there's absolutely no
way to fix the hidden traces, and ope, some PCB designer armed with an
autorouter has thrown logic signals right between the power supply
pins, and it's dead Jim. Time to spend $400 on a new motherboard and
that's not gonna be easy to install either. So quote parts + an hours
work and boy does the poor customer squeal. If only the power
connector had been on a daughterboard, connected by a flexible ribbon
cable, this would be a totally simple swap. But it does not happen.
Why? I imagine it's those extra 50 cents it would cost for the labor
to assemble it, plus the J.I.T. philosophy which renders it
blasphemous to maintain a stock of spares, even such small tidbits as
daughterboards and generic ribbon cable.

Much mad props to Apple and their MagSoft magnetic snap-off power
connector. Of course, Apples cost a bit extra, you have to pay for
the brand name.

No idea why electronics designers indulge in such casual cruelty.


.

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