We've had the opposite experience of HP power supplies, we just had to replace 70 HP supplies. When machines started failing in the field, I found that there was massive amounts of ripple on the 12v and 5v lines. When I disassembled the PSU it wasn't hard to tell why - bulging and leaking capacitors.

I don't think that's the problem though - after all, the Japanese and European makers aren't about to go to the wall, and the ones that are needing bale outs are people like Vauxhall (European subsidiary of GM), the European Ford, Open (European subsidiary of GM). If there were 30 Detroit auto makers, I think only a few would go to the wall still, because although the others may not be breathtakingly innovative, they might not be quite so badly managed as GM.

A computer doesn't just "draft up a circuit diagram" and connect chips like Lego. PCB design and layout is a real engineering discipline that takes real engineers to make a real working product. The computer tools are just that, they provide tools to make the engineer's job easier, but they don't magic up a circuit diagram automatically. It takes a real engineer with real experience to make a high speed digital design work properly. It is much more tricky than writing software because the real world (which includes things like parasitic inductance and capacitance, trace impedances, RF interference) heavily impinges on high speed digital design. There are almost books written on the subject of using decoupling capacitors alone and tomes of information on innocuous subjects that to the untrained eye look simple, like power and ground planes. In a high speed digital design, a PCB trace isn't simply a wire linking A to B to the engineer who is deciding where it should go on the PCB.

It takes a significant amount of time and effort, and a significant amount of knowledge to put together even relatively straightforward high speed digital designs. With the iPhone you also have to cram it into a very constrained amount of space, too. You can bet the engineers who laid out the PCB spent a great deal of time making sure that not only it would fit, but the resultant device would work and pass FCC testing.

I think it's pretty easy, last time I did it was with Livna - click on the RPM on their website and install it (using the GUI, naturally), then the new packages can easily be found in the Add/Remove software GUI along with all the usual Fedora stuff. Piece of cake.