PC design: Manufacturing: Although relatively simple to assemble, PCs contain highly complex parts; manufacturing them is more akin to making consumer goods than computer products

Personal computers are manufactured today in more ways than almost any other product, from fully automated plants where hardly a person disturbs the humming robots that build several machines each minute, to back room shops where a technician armed with only a screwdriver may produce 10 or 20 computers a day. Between these two extremes are assembly lines that use any imaginable mix of automated and manual operations; at the least, most lines use automated equipment for filling circuit boards with integrated circuits and soldering them in place.