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Re:Reversing Sinclair's 1974 calculator hack (2013) by Someone on Friday September 17, 2021 @08:40AM (#28564758)
“only two screws hold down the PCB to the case“

Nowadays, that’s two more than a product with cutthroat pricing should have. Engineering tolerances, even at low cost, are good enough to clamp the PCB in place.

Re:Reversing Sinclair's 1974 calculator hack (2013) by Too on Saturday September 18, 2021 @02:25AM (#28574165)
Are you Munroe Live on Youtube? It's a channel where they disassemble and review the internals of EVs. Any time he comes across a screw (threaded fastener), which happens all the time, he turns red and politely hints how the designers could have done a much better job.
Re:Reversing Sinclair's 1974 calculator hack (2013) by anyfoo on Friday September 17, 2021 @11:28AM (#28566603)
The funny part is that they obviously planned for much more.
Re:Reversing Sinclair's 1974 calculator hack (2013) by Someone on Monday September 20, 2021 @04:16PM (#28598405)
Or their manufacturing was so imprecise that they had to make more than two holes to (most of the time) get at least two that were in the right-enough place and where the screw would actually “grip” the plastic.

I expect, though, that the first batch used all holes and that this was a matter of using excess inventory with too many holes after realizing that they could do with fewer ones.

Re:Reversing Sinclair's 1974 calculator hack (2013) by anyfoo on Tuesday September 21, 2021 @06:53PM (#28611035)
Interesting with the imprecise manufacturing, haven't thought about it like that (and obviously don't know anything about the mechanical part of manufacturing).

I'm better at judging the electronics/computer design, and there it's obvious to me that they went out of their way to stay cheap.