Maybe their exists experts that can get this right every time but there are significant risks to damaging a chip desoldering and resoldering. It's not just removing a through hole capacitor.
Disclaimer I am no electrical engineer and have had limited experiences soldering components on circuit boards. But from all the tutorials I've been through, I agree. There are risks of damaging the NAND chip while desoldering and/or re-soldering chips on the board. Since there is the only piece of hardware with the information, perhaps the Feds aren't going to risk the chance of destroying the evidence all together after all they made the mistake of changing iCloud password already.
Yet the FBI's official plan is to get Apple to assign a few developers to put together a custom version of iOS that they trust will overcome all risk of erasing the device.
Is there a reason we should have confidence in software engineers rather than electrical engineers?
sw can test it on another phone till they get it right....EEs can only practice on another phone, if they screw up on the actual phone, it's gone burger
This.
The chip needs to be desoldered, cleaned (remove a layer of epoxy resin) and then finally reballed (secure a 0.3mm ball of solder on each of the > 64 connectors) just to get the on the chip reader.
Once you've done that you need to reverse the process.
I've done a few of these and they still scare me.
Its not a trivial process.
