On 05/21/2010 01:34 PM, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote: > > > On 05/19/2010 09:58 PM, Kyle Mcallister wrote:
>> Put another way, nothing is made with sockets any more. It's all >> hard-soldered. > > Assembly costs! If there's a socket, somebody must put something in it And reliability! Sockets lead directly to folded-up legs that didn't quite make it into the socket, whether it's humans or robots pushing the chips into the sockets. Usually that leads to crib death, but sometimes the bent leg will make unreliable contact, and the unit will seem to work OK until it's shipped. Hard soldering, particularly with surface mount components, simply doesn't suffer from that (very common) failure mode.
