I wasn't suggesting it did matter in regards to his mail-in business. Someone else mentioned that living in a large city makes it easier to maintain a high volume of work locally.
>Apple will charge you $475 to replace a motherboard rather that has a blow 40 cent capacitor on a MBP.
This is true. My point was that when a large computer repair shop run by arguably the most famous person in the electronics repair industry is only attracting enough work to have an annual revenue of 1-2 million a year, it could be entirely possible that a regular, non-famous person in a smaller electronics business might struggle to stay busy enough to earn enough of a living, even if certain repairs like the one you described are very profitable on their own.
Most places I've lived had a shop or two where someone would repair things like logic boards for cheap, using grey market parts.
You don't need 1-2 million a year to keep the lights on, there's people doing this stuff in their garages.
That is not the only consideration either, data recovery is as well, since most of the time that $475 also means your device is wiped and all data lost, an independent shop could even charge someone that same $475 but retain the data and it would be worth it to the customer.
The geographical location of the repairer does not matter because shipping is a thing.
And the fact that these repairers will charge per repair rather than a flat fee for partial replacements of entire boards like OEMs do means they can be cost effective while profitable.
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Apple will charge you $475 to replace a motherboard rather that has a blow 40 cent capacitor on a MBP.
Between the 40 cent cost of the component and labor, there's a lot of meat left for individual repairers left to make money.