PC Automated Assembly

[SorryBella]

From what i know of prebuilt PCs, whether its Dell, HP, iBP, Origin, etc., These companies still build their PC towers handbuilt. Whats stopping companies from making automated lines, atleast for attaching repeated stuff like motherboard, CPU, and storage in its place before a human hand handles its wiring? It can make assembly costs lower across the board.

[Avocado Diaboli]

Just at a glance, there are a few factors to consider whether it'd be worth creating a machine that can assemble these components for you.

 

The first one and easiest one to solve is that you have to know how many prebuilts get sold, because you obviously need to have enough of them where the cost-savings of having them assembled by a robot eventually pays for the creation of said robot.

 

The second immediate problem I see is that there's not much standardization going on in terms of motherboard layouts unless it directly interfaces with the case. PCIe slots obviously need to be in the right place to line up with the cutouts on the back of the case, but all the other internal components can be wherever they fit. So you'd have to restrict yourself to a single type of motherboard or invest in a highly adjustable machine, which would raise costs.

 

The fourth problem are the physical dimensions of the components. Graphics cards and RAM don't really need to conform to any specific form-factor beyond the electronic interfaces, so again, you either have to settle for a single design of the hardware or invest in an adjustable machine.

 

The fourth problem is that tech evolves over time and there's no real way to determine that a bot designed to assemble current day components into a current day motherboard would even be able to be used for newer tech that comes along, new standards that get established etc, so by any reasonable metric, the machine has a finite shelf life.

 

All of these problems don't exist if you continue employing humans to do that task, because adaptability is our greatest strength.

[Kronoton]

Even phones aren't build fully automated. Millions and millions of units all exactly the same and they still use (cheap) manual labor.

 

All you need to know.