For example. There are faster ones but with this one you can still follow the action. (est. about 8000 cph, 20K cph is available right now and is too fast to follow directly, you'd need to videotape it and then slow down the movie, it places 6 parts per second, when you look at one up close it looks like parts simply appear on the board out of nowhere). Not all that long ago that work would have been done by a small army of people, and that board would have been 10 times the size. Automation works iteratively, after enough steps it becomes worth it to design to the tooling rather than the other way around. So at some point your phone won't have screws or cables, and the screen will be sandwiched right on top of the board if that's the most economical. Cables are a source of unreliability anyway and screws are made for dis-assembly whereas the trend is to concentrate on the assembly phase with dis-assembly (and repair) becoming ever more difficult.
PCB creation has been extremely automated for a long time now. Between pick-and-place (around since the 1980s) and reflow soldering (auto-magic soldering), its safe to say that PCBs have been automated for the last 30 years at very least.
So yes, its impressive that modern pick-and-place is so fast, but really, it was a solved problem that has only become "more solved" as the years have passed.
In contrast, actual _assembly_ work is still very human based. The iPhone is famous for this. There are exceptions of course (the Sony Walkman was famous for being a purely automatic design from start to finish... the Tesla Car is mostly automated IIRC as well). But the typical products of the modern person (iPhones and Ford Cars) are still largely assembled in human assembly lines.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRu02F6AOmg
For example. There are faster ones but with this one you can still follow the action. (est. about 8000 cph, 20K cph is available right now and is too fast to follow directly, you'd need to videotape it and then slow down the movie, it places 6 parts per second, when you look at one up close it looks like parts simply appear on the board out of nowhere). Not all that long ago that work would have been done by a small army of people, and that board would have been 10 times the size. Automation works iteratively, after enough steps it becomes worth it to design to the tooling rather than the other way around. So at some point your phone won't have screws or cables, and the screen will be sandwiched right on top of the board if that's the most economical. Cables are a source of unreliability anyway and screws are made for dis-assembly whereas the trend is to concentrate on the assembly phase with dis-assembly (and repair) becoming ever more difficult.
Reballing BGA's is so much fun.