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.

Which would all be very useful if Apple actually did board-level repairs and not logic board swaps. But they don't, so it is all just for show.

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?

It correlates with how much stuff you can pack into a small device.

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.

I have seen some Apple ][ motherboards with jumper wire(s) hidden on the back side.

Jobs knew a lot about hardware design, sure:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_III

> Jobs insisted on the idea of having no fan or air vents, in order to make the computer run quietly.

> Many Apple IIIs were thought to have failed due to their inability to properly dissipate heat.