If I had damaged a small part of something I'd bought, I would be angry if the quote for fixing it would be nearly the price of the whole item new.
If you buy a car, hit a kurb and destroy a wheel, wouldn't you be annoyed if it was only the manufacturer that could fix it, and they would charge you 70% of the price of a full car?
The display on a laptop is almost certainly not a small part. When I got the display replaced on a 2015 MacBook under warranty (Apple extended because of screen mottling due to a manufacturing defect), they replaced the entire display assembly, i.e. top half of the laptop case and all.
In general, I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect the manufacturer to make parts available more granularly than they do to their own repair centers.
But what if you had to replace the RAM, what would that cost? The CPU? Fix the keyboard? I think the total sum if you add the various components up it would be 10x a new machine, excluding the actual labor costs. And when there are others wanting to do it cheaper, but are being blocked by Apple, this doesn't sit right with me.
Not a very good analogy--a wheel, even a nice one, is like 1% of the value of a new car. That display is probably single most expensive component in the whole machine.
Why assume something that is a “small” part necessarily would result in a repair price that is less than x% of purchase price?
There are myriad factors that affect repair place, especially for something as technologically advanced as the newest laptops. Labor prices, design of the laptop, parts supplies, etc.
Of course, the ability for only one entity to source and supply those will tilt the scales towards a higher price, but that is unrelated to the “small”-ness of the damage.
As a hypothetical, suppose the camera glass or lens was made with materials or a technique that caused it to be 90% of a phone’s cost to produce. Then replacing this item would cost >90% of the phone’s price, even though it is “small”.
Or you have a huge transport ship that has an issue with a propeller or a small part of the ship on the bottom, but it needs a dry dock to repair, and there are only a couple dry docks in the world that can handle it. Then the price could be a very high percentage of original price due to the extreme supply and demand curves involved.
Repair costs are not a simple a function of the “size” of the damage.
> As a hypothetical, suppose the camera glass or lens was made with materials or a technique that caused it to be 90% of a phone’s cost to produce. Then replacing this item would cost >90% of the phone’s price, even though it is “small”.
When I say there are people who do the repair for much cheaper I mean including the price they pay for the part, not merely their labor. Your hypothetical is not the case here.
I don't get how that addresses anything. Maybe they're "tilted" toward a "higher" price, but until you put actual numbers on these (are we talking $10 higher or $1000 higher?) it doesn't say anything. I'm saying that, for a wide variety of common repairs, it is a fact that you can literally get the exact same repair done for the exact same issue (parts, labor, everything being the same) for far less (literally hundreds) than Apple does it for you. And I'm talking about profitable businesses here, not charities. There's no need to give hypothetical academic rebuttals on economics when the facts are clear on the ground.
The only thing broken on the Mac was the glass display, which I guarantee you does not cost more than $100 to replace wholesale, even with labor. However, Apple doesn't offer this repair for you. Instead, they sell you an entire topcase to replace the entire top half of your computer, even if your aluminum case, display, hinge, backlight, microphone and webcam are all fine. Your only option is replacing everything, at which point, I think OP has reason to be mad. Apple simply doesn't invest money in making their devices more repairable, they make too much money off selling replacements for it to be lucrative. That's fine, and their decision to make, but there's a real human/UX cost that comes with making fragile hardware.
Parts? Manufacturing? Shipping? Labour? Storage? Distribution? There's more to a part than the cost. Now whether or not what they're charging is over the top, then I doubt you'll find much disagreement; however, the GP doesn't say how the damage happened. I don't know of a single vendor that will cover accidental damages on a screen, and no-one is responsible other than the party that caused the damage. Also, late 2020 MBA (M1) goes for $465, with ~$30 for the parts, ~$15 for shipping.
And if you bent the frame of the car and broke the suspension and did some damage to the sensors on your suspension? In the US it would cost a fortune and it wouldn’t shock me if it costs 70% of the value of the car.
The outrage is justified if the screen cracked due to a manufacturing defect. Otherwise, get over it and be careful with your stuff if you can’t afford the repair.
And before you send something off, ask questions. The shipping costs I’m sure would have been disclosed.
> Otherwise, get over it and be careful with your stuff if you can’t afford the repair.
I don't know if you're an engineer, but if you are you probably don't take the same approach to errors in your software. Being careful is only part of the solution to reducing risk. Another is adopting practices and patterns that are less error-prone. And another is to reduce the impact of errors when they do happen.
With a software service, we might have redundancy, and a watchdog or orchestration system that restarts any instances that crash. With a laptop, we might purchase accidental damage insurance, or just decide to buy a brand that is cheaper to repair.
When humans are involved, "be more careful" is rarely a successful strategy on its own.
If you buy a car, hit a kurb and destroy a wheel, wouldn't you be annoyed if it was only the manufacturer that could fix it, and they would charge you 70% of the price of a full car?