[captainmuon]

It's not even just consumer electronics. I work on a particle physics experiment, and some sensors we use to detect particles are ball-bonded to the readout electronics. It turns out that thermal cycling between say -20 and 20 °C (operational vs. room temperature) a couple of times the balls break and we loose sensitivity in part of the sensor.

It seems people hate these ball bonds and want to move away from them. One alternative is wirebonds, which have their own problems. They are pretty fragile and time consuming to set. I've also learned today that they start to vibrate and break if nearby wires carry a signal at their resonance frequency, which is pretty crazy.

The golden alternative would be to build everything (sensor + electronics) from one monolithic wafer. Instead of making a silicon sensor, some silicon ASICs, and joining them with a PCB, you'd directly put the electronics in the sensor and make it one big CMOS circuit. However it will take a couple of years until we can do that.