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Comment by nrp | Hacker News Reader

We're able to make schematics and board views available to repair shops, but not to individual end users: https://knowledgebase.frame.work/en_us/availability-of-schem...

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What is the definition of a "repair shop"?

I have, on my property, a standalone building in which I engage in a variety of activities to include fairly deep level repair of electronics. I have surface mount soldering skills and equipment (hot air rework, magnification, soldering tips), and documented surface mount work on my blog.

But I'm not a "random corner computer shop that can replace RAM."

Do I qualify, should I want schematics?

Don't worry, if the history of all the laptops which don't even have any schematics available officially is to continue, they will be leaked soon enough.

The link doesn't make clear why end users can't have access to this.

Disagree. Many people like me who don’t operate a formal shop have a Quick station and know what’s Amtech flux. I want access to schematics and boardviews. It is nonsense to withhold them.

Why not?

My first guess would be NDAs

I wouldn't expect so. All you get of third party parts on the schematic is the names of the pins, and that generally isn't kept secret. Sometimes the detailed functional descriptions of each pin are, but generally not anything you'd see from the schematic.

If you look at the Open Compute project, there's full schematics available for boards that have far more interesting parts than what would be on this.

Intel has become notoriously secretive with their documentation over the years, so I think that is very much the issue here. The 8086/8 were very open, but they started closing off little bits at a time after that. "Appendix H" in the P5 era was the first major sign of it. Bits and pieces have leaked out over time, but they still want to keep a lot of it secret.

For comparison, someone has made an entire 386 PC motherboard himself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29273829

I suspect there's enough information out there publicly to do everything up to perhaps a PIII (Socket 370 era) or thereabouts, but it starts being much harder beyond that.

Guessing so that Chinese clones don't flood market with knockoffs?

They would do that anyway, publicly-available schematics or no.

A lot of existing (leaked) x86 mobo schematics are already available to anyone who cares to look. I don't think there's much "secret sauce" in a standard PC anyway, at least at the component interconnect level; it's almost like one of the worst-kept-secrets in the industry. There is a lot of commonality between all the designs. They might differ in the exact parts they use (e.g. VRM MOSFETs) but there's only so many ways to make something that works.

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