I've seen very little of him, and didn't know he was 'The Right To Repair Guy', but I saw him freak out over an Apple laptop because he took the back off and the fan was not directly over the chip like in gamer PCs.

This, in a machine that's been designed for generations to have a fan pull air aggressively THROUGH a channel, the only path the air can go, that goes directly across the CPU heatsink. This is not a 'circulating the air' situation: a laptop can't do that. It's an overall system with many considerations (turbulence, air handling noise) that is no longer a system at all if you take the top of the duct off. You cannot run that sort of machine with the case taken apart, it's part of the ducting.

Either he's dishonest for effect (and clicks), or he's considerably dumber than a drummer and college dropout (yours truly! derp!) about cooling airflow in a constrained duct inside a laptop. At face value, he's dumber. For his sake I hope he's dishonest.

I don’t think he’s ‘dumb’. Just not an engineer. He unscrews computers and replaces parts and puts them back together. I’m disappointed he doesn’t concentrate on the important topic of right to repair and finds things to criticise that seem like they’re chosen to play to the lowest common denominator.

Sounds like you misunderstood the criticisms of that laptops cooling design (which was abysmal to the point where it pretty much had to be deliberate). I would suggest refraining from calling people dumber than yourself, until you're totally sure how dumb you actually are.

Unfortunately Rossman’s critique of the cooling design really is as silly as Applejinx suggests. For some reason he seems to think that fans need to be next to the things that they are cooling.

As someone who was a mechanic, and later became an engineer, this is the main reason why I find Rossman's videos insufferable. He is constantly making assumptions about how electronics are designed based on his views as a repair man. As a mechanic I made the same assumptions, but I was later able to learn that every decision an engineer makes is one of compromise, based on hundreds of variables that the mechanic does not know about because of the narrow view that any technician has concerning the product that they are servicing: observing the hard shell of an egg and assuming that the contents must be equally hard.

> the design of a modern motherboard, which is highly complex

The design of a modern motherboard is far from complex since all the complexity has pretty much been hidden inside the black boxes of highly integrated circuits. You as a designer do not in general need to concern yourself with the implementation details and just need to understand the interfaces, similar to, for example, using python's numpy as opposed to writing BLAS or LAPACK from scratch.

What knowledge and experience do you have of designing motherboards or other similarly complex PCBs?

Getting GHz frequency circuits to work requires much more than just understanding the digital interfaces.

If you think designing and laying out a modern motherboard is “easy”, then there’s a 1% chance that you’re a highly experienced and capable electronic engineer, and a 99% chance that you just have no idea about the existence of entire classes of problems that need to be solved to make a motherboard work.

Would not call myself an experienced electronics engineer (have only gotten into RF lately, but yes I know about signal integrity and EMI problems), but getting GHz circuits to work on a modern motherboard is not as big of a deal as you might think mainly because it is a "solved problem" with best practices and design tools, and there are just not really that many things to connect together.

I am not saying it is trivial or that Rossmann could do it with his knowledge (no, he could not) or that anyone could do it. I just claimed that in the grand scheme of things it is not "highly complex" (as opposed to pretty much anything analog, or proper RF, or getting the actual implementation inside the chips correct).

It seems that we agree then. Rossman is operating well outside his knowledge and expertise when critiquing the design of a motherboard. As far as I know the guy has never so much as blinked an LED with an Arduino, or designed a simple two-sided low frequency PCB. A motherboard is way more complex than anything a hobbyist electronics enthusiast will ever work on.

If you haven’t actually been involved in designing a motherboard yourself, I’m also inclined to believe that there might well be complexities that you’re unaware of. Power management is complex. Routing hundreds of length-matched high frequency traces is complex. Low power circuits are complex. Safely charging LiPo batteries is complex. If you can show me something similarly complex that you’ve done yourself, then I’ll be willing to believe your claim that all of this is not really very difficult.

I think it depends on what he is specifically criticizing.

I have not designed a motherboard, but plenty of smaller digital IC-based schematics and PCBs and in my experience the most problematic part has been either erroneous or lack of proper documentation or bugs in ICs which there are plenty of.

What I recommend you to do is to compare the schematics of, for example, Thinkpad T420 and Keithley 2001 both of which should be available with a search. What you will find is that the former is a collection of specialized chips (including one for battery charging) with mostly datasheet reference design based implementations + bunch of mosfets for enabling/disabling/routing signals, whereas the latter has almost none of that and plenty of analog "cleverness" and "raw" digital design, let alone the power input, which in my opinion was totally overdesigned. Or take any oscilloscope, where you need to design not only a computer but also an analog front-end + high frequency signal processing, not only routing. And I'm not even going into the actual RF board designs which you are probably well aware of is more physics than electronics.

Again I am not saying that it is easy for any guy on the street, but "relatively easy" to understand what is going on on the motherboard as opposed to the actual complex stuff. So if you see a common fault among many motherboards you can probably conclude that that specific area of the design was bad and criticize that. Whether the criticism is valid might be another question, but I would not automatically dismiss it.

Edit: I will put designing a motherboard on my todo list.

If only everyone on the HN really adhered to the "ne sutor supra crepidam" principle, I bet an entry with a dozen comments would be considered crowded.

Just saying.

You are the "you can't criticise a movie if you are not a seasoned director" kind...

I don’t think that’s a good analogy. This is like being critiqued on your software architecture by someone who’s never written ‘Hello World’.

Seems more like being critiqued on your software architecture by someone who has to debug your code.

I’d hope that the person debugging my code had written at least one program of their own. If not, I wouldn’t be particularly interested in their opinions on software architecture.