[dogma1138]

TBH Apple stuff is about the only thing you can repair as repair shops are nearly exclusively focused on Apple because of the large volume and long lifespan of their models.

Good luck getting a Samsung Note 2014 repaired (I tried) or a Lenovo laptop that needs say a mainboard or some BGA replacement.

While I don’t agree with how Apple restricts 3rd party repairs the reason they are the only one you hear about is because they are the only one with a 3rd party repair ecosystem to begin with.

[omnimus]

I guess it depends on country. Probably in US. There is only one authorized service dealer in my country. On the other hand most of the PC market brands has lots of repair shops. And lot of them will do even old machines, hunt parts on ebay or china and repair with that. It's actually not that hard (the parts nofficial apple repair shops use are from china anyway). There are so many eshops where you just put serial number and get what you need.

There is big reason for this though. I am from quite poor european country where hourly rate for technicians is much much lower than in US so repairing lot of things make economical sense. In us this might make sense only for high end premium machines.