I've been lamenting the increasing difficulty of fixing phones, tablets and ultrathin laptops, and I just concluded that since I can't change anything, I might

I've been lamenting the increasing difficulty of fixing phones, tablets and ultrathin laptops, and I just concluded that since I can't change anything, I might as well get more advanced tools. It used to take a few screwdrivers and a soldering iron... well, newer tech is much more complex, so you just need better tools. A heat gun, thermal glue, prying tools, magnifier, a rework station, and you're good to go. Everything being soldered on one board is a real travesty - a failed system board on a new laptop means you throw away the CPU, GPU, RAM and even the SSD. That just seems insane to me, a laptop that's a few mm thinner is not worth it, I'd rather have the CPU socketed, GPU, RAM and storage slotted. People with laptops that use MXM slots are upgrading from Kepler GPUs to Maxwell, Pascal and newer, everyone else is buying whole new machines. What a waste. But that might actually make it cheaper to fix or upgrade BGA chips since you can buy the whole failed system board pretty cheap. Just gotta have the right tools.