That level of enterprise support can be nice, but does indeed come from much larger companies that can afford distribution centers across various parts of the world as well as partners who hold parts in warehouses and have contractors drive out to deliver. It also is baked into the excessive margins that those parts are priced at, so the scope is a bit different.
A lot has changed since 2010 in terms of costs of labor, parts, etc. I don’t know any companies that offer good support in 2024. Apple overcharges you, locks you into their ecosystem, has god awful technicians that basically tell you that you need a new laptop. Microsoft even at the corporate level offers some of the worst support I’ve seen. Dell frequently denies support requests labeling issues as user damage in the business and consumer environment. That’s leaving aside the poor repairability and planned obsolescence that most large companies (even outside of consumer electronics) bake into their products these days.
The quality of Lenovo’s modern laptops deserves an honorable mention as well, just as an aside.
True, I touched on not truly free costs of support in the beginning in that it eats into product margins or increases costs from a business perspective, but yes, not truly free.
As for frequently user damaged, most of the repairs or replacements I see at my company are pretty clearly user damage (though users never seem to know how it happens, lie, or treat their devices like an old Nokia phone). That’s when it’s not an issue with a manufacturing defect, which is a smaller but significant portion of repairs.
My point here is that they are replacing clearly user damaged parts in systems in a similar way that my company does for end users. I’ve read a number of posts in the forum where it’s pretty clear that the user was at fault, or is not understanding something that still gets a part shipped. They do err on the side of the user from what I’ve seen so far in my own interactions and within forum posts.
Things could be better, documentation could be better, processes could be better, etc etc etc. The point I’m making is that customer support is hell right now in the consumer electronics world, but the support being offered actually favors the end user of the product even though it’s slow and even though it’s frustrating.