You know those tech chips (which might not even be chips, but to my uneducated eye look like chips).
In: Technology
Each chip serves a specific purpose
There are little timer chips and little memory chips and little controller chips that let you interface with them and little power chips that give you the right power for the other chips. In theory you could make a single chip that integrates the functions of all the other chips but it would only do a single thing. By having chips with dedicated functions, if you need a timer chip you buy one of them and put it on your board, and since they’re making billions of them for all sorts of applications each chip is cheap
The board itself serves to connect the little legs on all the little chips so that power goes where it needs to and data goes to the right places. We used to solder individual wires to components which works fine when your component is relatively large and there are a few wires per part but doesn’t work nearly as well when your 13mm x 13mm chip has over 200 connection points on the bottom of it.
Using circuit boards allows us to use high precision machines to place the parts down onto the pads and they can work with some really really tiny parts (0.4mm x 0.2mm) and they can put down tens of thousands of parts per hour. Building modern phones at all wouldn’t be possible with circuit boards, and building small phones cheaply would be impossible without the fancy machines
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