Re: Re. Handling issue
"I used to reflow the thing by leaving the LED flash on for half an hour under a pillow."
You must be joking; do you know the melting point of solder?
The Murata wifi IC needs reflowing at 200C, and this is a pig of a job (mainly because of the sheer number of disassembly steps to get there, but also because while reflowing you cannot test the circuit board to see if everything is working.)
What you were actually doing is causing the components to distort slightly by applying heat and hoping that the loose leg would stay in contact after the thing cooled. It could only ever be a very short term fix.
I suspect that at some point phone technology will become such that they are easy to repair again (the 6S seems to be better than earlier iPhones in this regard). Perhaps one day Apple will announce a new iPhone with user replaceable batteries, and everybody will think it is a new Apple invention. In the meantime there is a tradeoff - buy Apple and pay a lot for what is basically insurance (hoping that any problem that emerges will be acknowledged by Apple) or buy cheap competition and accept that if anything peculiar happens you will need to fix it yourself.
Overall I think the big difference in design between Apple and the rest is that Apple engineers optimise the hell out of software and use compiled languages so that they can get very good performance from modest hardware, while the competition tend to stick in big batteries and fast CPUs to deal with suboptimal software. Which is very good until you run something power intensive on an iPhone, causing it to exceed its design envelope.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
