Have another look at your numbers, you have assumed that there are only 100 repair shops in the word. I would imagine this number is much higher (a google search for 'iphone micro soldering repair shop' gives 473k results)
But also we should take into context how many iPhone 6 and 6+s have been sold. The first article on a Google search comes up with Wired who is discussing numbers from Oct-Dec of last year and in that time Apple sold 75 MILLION iPhones.
And I think the iPhone 6 model has only been out for a year or two, right? So even if we quadrupled the defect number per year, we'd still fall quite short of even the recent Samsung recall.
Please keep in mind I'm not saying it's not a problem, just trying to help put numbers into perspective.
Link to article: http://www.wired.com/2016/01/apple-sold-a-record-number-of-i...
how about a google for "iphone repair shop" (with double quotes) gives 155k results. Eyeballing a few pages of results seems like the vast majority of results are for real iPhone repair shops. From this I would confidently estimate that there are > 15k and < 1.5m iPhone repair shows worldwide.
Number of google results for a keyword doesn't really give a good indication of how many stores there are for that thing in the world. 473,000 repair shops would be 1,000 for every Apple Store. I'm sure there's a lot but that seems a bit high.
Regardless, I didn't attempt to draw the line through number of iPhone repair shops in the world because we have no evidence whether all repair shops in the world are seeing this problem, only the ones the author of the article talked to.
I don't know, it depends on how many the author actually spoke to and how he came by them. If he found them because he saw them all talking about this problem, that's not a statistically reliable means of sampling repair shops. His selection was biased and driven by the issue.
> It's definitely not reasonable to assume that the only iPhones that are failing are the ones served by that handful of repair shops.
I didn't. Read my comment again.