I had a job wire-wrapping circuit boards in college.
I expended effort to lay out the wires so they formed a neat pattern. Why spend time doing that? It made it easy to check for errors in wiring, as then the pattern would be disrupted. The end result was I almost never made a wirewrap mistake, and the work was appreciated.
I also soldered components on, and also took care to orient the resisters all the same way, and align everything neatly. I'd use needle nose pliers to bend the leads just so, too. It also made visual error checking fast and easy. Again, no errors.
I dunno man, Apple's PCB designs are incredibly space efficient. Compare the sandwich PCB of a modern iPhone against the main board of something like a Samsung Galaxy. Apple is sweating out every cubic millimetre it can, while Samsung is perfectly fine with a load of empty green PCB all over the place.
Does discrete circuit density correlate with engineering quality somehow? Are we back around to the parable of Master Foo and the Hardware Designer in the year of our lord and savior 2025?
Apple definitely refurbs boards. They just don't do it in the back of an Apple Store. It's far more economical for them to do full logic board swaps (or other components) than spend the time and effort doing component level repairs in the back of a retail store.
I expended effort to lay out the wires so they formed a neat pattern. Why spend time doing that? It made it easy to check for errors in wiring, as then the pattern would be disrupted. The end result was I almost never made a wirewrap mistake, and the work was appreciated.
I also soldered components on, and also took care to orient the resisters all the same way, and align everything neatly. I'd use needle nose pliers to bend the leads just so, too. It also made visual error checking fast and easy. Again, no errors.