They’re following the model of the tech industry, which makes sense because there’s a lot of crossover there

I fixed an acer laptop yesterday. It was a gaming one, like a $700 laptop. Wouldn’t turn on. Acer said the motherboard had to be replaced. When I got it I found a blown capacitor shorting the main power rail, replaced it, and it works fine now. A part that costs like 3 cents in bulk. Repair was roughly 45 minutes including diagnosis.

For this one a motherboard swap isn’t the end of the world but the additional point is that for many of modern laptops and for all phones this results in a superior repair. This laptop in particular had removable nvme storage but tons of laptops have the ssd soldered directly to the motherboard so swapping the motherboard means you lose all your data. No one ever has backups lmao

But acer, apple, Lenovo, hp, etc all do this. It’s much easier to train their techs to just do board swaps, it’s much more lucrative to make repairs a several hundred dollar endeavor instead of the pennys it would cost to replace passives or basic ics, etc. they then send the “junk” boards off to the manufacturing depot in sea to actually get fixed and then sell them again as refurbished