Manufacturers are constantly squeezing more and more stuff into phones and then trying to get longer and longer battery life at the same time. One way to get longer battery life is by using a lower powered transceiver. The FCC requires different devices to operate within a certain power range and my guess is Apple decided to go on the lower end of the power scale for their later phones' transceivers to improve battery life. They likely can get away with that in their more urban settings with overlapping cellular coverage, but in the more rural areas, that lower power transceiver becomes a big issue.
That nonstop tug of war between doing more stuff with a more powerful phone, while getting longer battery life at the same time forces manufacturers into making tough decisions. "Do I stick with a lower powered CPU for better battery life, or a lower powered transceiver?" What does my customer use more? The CPU and our rivals are also coming out with a more powerful CPU. "We'll go with the lower powered transceiver then."
The reality is there's only so much power one can cram into a phone's battery and constantly using more and more powerful CPU's with faster memory and more memory to make the phones smarter means those components need more power. If those components are getting more power then they've got to cut a corner someplace. What else uses a lot of power in the phone? The transceiver. If you can't cut the power to the CPU/memory and you can't make a more powerful battery, then that extra power the CPU needs has to come from some other component and that other component was likely the transceiver.
If you've ever built a computer from scratch, and modern smartphones are essentially a computer, you'd know that accurately sizing the power supply is important. Every component in a computer uses power and you have to account for all of those power needs in picking a power supply. In a real computer, you can get enormous power supplies that can handle any load. In a smartphone the power supply options are much more limited. Try to squeeze too much power into a battery and you end up with exploding/combusting phones like Samsung just experienced. With limited power available then you've got to pick the components that make best use of that power. Apple appears to have decided to compromise on the transceiver side instead of the CPU side. That means you get dropped calls as the power for the transceiver just isn't there to consistently reach your cell towers.
The only real workaround is to hope your provider moves a tower closer (maybe reaims an antennna more directly towards your location,) or you get a cell phone booster. As phone makers try to constanlty squeeze more and more powerful CPU's into phones that need more and more power, more and more people will experience this problem. You may have the fastest, most powerful phone around, but you just can't use it as a phone. It's a heck of a computer though.
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