I did not understand the procedure of these two examples of soldering: but by cone tip we mean the tip with the concave part? 
I should have called it a conical or pencil tip, instead to slanging it to "cone". You get the most precise control of where the heat is applied with this type of tip, which is what is needed for hand soldering the smallest parts (0603 and smaller).
For example, soldering wires to a 0.5mm BGA is good practice for those that don't understand what a pencil tip does:
Oh cooome on, dude…
The OP of this thread clearly isn't even distantly experienced enough to be trying to dead-bug a BGA. And moreover, YOU just said how they're great for THT soldering!
Nor is a microscopic tip remotely necessary for something as large as an 0603.
Where tiny tips become necessary isn't because of the size of the joint you need to solder, but because of the close proximity of neighboring joints that you need to not disturb. And if you do, there are other tiny shapes, too. (Like my 0.4x0.2mm chisel.)
Finally, not all conical tips are tiny. Lots of soldering irons ship with a non-tiny conical tip as standard, typically something around 1mm. (My guess is that they're cheaper to manufacture than chisel tips.)
I was trying to say that that the tip doesn't actually have to "hold" any solder to solder stuff - it just has to contact and heat the target.
The circular shape means a conical tip literally
cannot have any significant contact area with the workpiece. At best, an infinitesimally thin line, at worst, a single infinitesimally tiny dot. In practice, these tips rely
entirely on the thermal bridge of the solder on the tip to transfer heat to the workpiece. Chisels, bevels, etc. take advantage of that too, but also allow for direct heat transfer through larger direct contact areas. I
still have yet to encounter a joint where I've thought "yeah, you know what, a conical tip would do this
better than anything else".
Basically the same small pencil tip can be used for soldering everything from 0.5mm BGA balls to header pins. Can any other tip do that?
You realize this is the first time you've actually brought up this characteristic, which is perhaps the single argument in favor of conical tips? Nearly everything else you've claimed is either not specific to conical tips, or is outright wrong.
No, because for the small stuff, every shape converges to the same thing, as you said further on.
The pencil tip has a really big "dynamic range" for the jobs it can do, so I use it 95% of the time to avoid having to change tips.
Is changing tips that burdensome? On modern cartridge-style irons (like the JBC I have at work) changing tips takes no tools and only takes seconds (with your hands nowhere near the hot tip), and on the Ersa this thread is about (which is what I use at home), it takes only slightly longer, namely the time to unscrew one tip and screw on the other. It's not as though one constantly changes tips back and forth during a job, since you just do all the joints of one kind at a time, then switch tips and do all the joints of the next kind, etc.
Using a tip optimized for the job at hand makes the joints take less time, which saves time and is gentler on the workpiece. As such, I don't actually consider universality to be a particularly compelling argument. (In general, I prefer elegant, optimized tools over universal tools, which require fewer tools, but rarely perform quite as well as the dedicated ones.)
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