I think it was Steve Jobs who insisted that that even the inside of their products look as clean as the outside. It unfortunately means it's a pain to disassemble, but they certainly do look pretty.
Source: Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography.
(Sadly, Sir Ive's obsession with thinness and minimalism did not mesh with actual ergonomics equally well.)
And, goddamn, it doubled the effort for finishing a jacket.
To be fair, at that point the replacement rate was so fast that I can see why it didn't make sense to spend time making it repairable. The issue is they kept that philosophy for way too long into models that would last quite a while and need repairs in the long term.
Now they have started fixing their act (well under a lot of both public pressure and legal pressure from EU) and the latest model doesn't just look pretty, they start to make sense from an (dis)assembly/fixing point of view.
A least now they have figured out that they can put the port on a separate board so you don't have to literally disassemble the whole phone just to replace the port (that tend to fail under heavy use, especially the models based on the 6 that needed a lot of juicing).
Looks are deceiving, don't be fooled, just because it looks neat doesn't mean it is.
In the same way, artillery shells and landmines are highly regular and neat in their internal structure which affords them the ability to bear immense loads and release large amounts of energy. But it's never about the ease of disarming them, it's exactly about the opposite, about making safe disassembly hard or impossible.
Here are the firsts 2 definition of the word neat: - free from dirt and disorder: habitually clean and orderly - marked by skill or ingenuity
And modern iPhone's internals do not really feel like that at all. They are interesting to look at, but the whole design is clearly made to cut costs and meet some arbitrary requirements. There is not much neat about it.
There are dozens of screws, with many different imprints (for some reason) with all kinds of different lengths (when it surely wouldn't be complicated to figure out a cleaner approach). They overuse fragile ribbon cable, often putting them in place where they can get easily damaged during disassembly/repair. They still haven't figured out a neat way to make batteries not move without relying on stupid glue stripes that always break. There are plenty of small pieces that need to be screwed down when it feels that they could be part of larger assemblies or have a better/easier way to install.
Now don't get me wrong, the iPhone is a very technologically advanced device, with extreme miniaturisation of some things that are just incredible.
But it's not something that you could call neat. It's not a perfectly symmetrical engine with shinny tubes well laid out that is just as beautiful to look at as it is powerful.
It is just a pragmatic design to accomplish a form factor at a specific price point, the rest are just side effects or nice to have. And in a way it makes sense they have this approach, because they change the thing every year, never committing to a particular form factor or set of functionalities (which is the whole point to entice replacement) but that doesn't come with neatness.
As for reliability, iPhones are not any more reliable than equally priced Android smartphones. It seems that way because Apple has higher exigence and thus better-quality control for parts and also will often swap phones for factory problems easily (under warranty or not).
But they are not any more reliable when you put price/costs into the equation, most people make the mistake of comparing a cheapo 200/300 dollars Android with a minimum 500 dollars iPhone (more likely minimum 800), it would be sad if they couldn't figure out to make them more dependable at 2-3 times the price. Hilariously, the way they do it is with forgoing neatness and adding a lot of annoyingly small parts at ingress points and using very strong glues. Not neat at all.