Seems plausible, yes.

The screens arrive at the factory by boat, in an optimally-packed container. Replacement screens are individually packaged and delivered in low volume by courier.

Apple must first examine the laptop, which isn't free, then put in the replacement, and do acceptance testing, because they warranty repairs, and even if they didn't, not repairing something and claiming it's a repair is bad press.

Maybe they make profit as well who knows, but it's easy for me to believe that the assembly-line price of a screen triples by the time a repair is installed and the user gets the laptop back.

Starting to look like some of the M1 Airs got a bad batch of screen glass, which is a separate matter. If so, here's my prediction: Apple will do the same thing they did for the butterfly keyboards and eat the replacement cost, and people will be complaining about it ten years later.

Unlike the butterfly fiasco, I'm not betting on this being a design flaw, it's either the law of large numbers or a badly-tempered batch of glass.

None of that is relevant to the cost to replace an uninsured screen which broke under user-error conditions.

Everyone here is capable of looking up shipping prices from China or similar even for the volume of 1 screen, and seeing it doesn't cost hundreds of dollars.

Similarly, the average pay of Genius Bar employees and Apple repair techs is semi-public knowledge that can be found on the internet.

Nobody is believing that it costs Apple $400-500 in additional expenses _per screen_ to repair MacBooks.

> but it's easy for me to believe that the assembly-line price of a screen triples by the time a repair is installed and the user gets the laptop back.

Like it or not, in a lovely city called Shenzhen, it costs you $200 to get your macbook pro's screen replaced in a regular roadside repair shop just next building to your fancy apple shop.

As a low skill job, you get to master the procedure by watching online video tutorials, interestingly, that is also a viable business in Shenzhen, they have such "online schools" to get people trained for such jobs and some of their videos are free -

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLCQRIZLWDzzzhgKwSWBoRg/vid...

No doubt, feel free to find a service in Shenzhen you can ship your Mac to and employ them. It's not even implausible if you speak fluent Chinese, there are uh. Limits to your ability to recover if you make a bad choice, but it might work out.

And locals can import those screens right? Little bit of markup. Anyway let me know what the actual price is where you are, from someone who will actually do it, and isn't Apple, all of this is legal and the service is available. That will give us a point of comparison.

A replacement costs $600 at iFixit: https://www.ifixit.com/Store/Mac/MacBook-Pro-14-Inch-2021-A2...

That seems like a pretty normal price for recent MacBook screens: https://www.ifixit.com/Parts/MacBook_Pro_13%22/Screens

iFixit has to get those screens by salvaging them off of MacBooks. The cost to Apple to produce the screen is almost certainly closer to $100-$200.

>The cost to Apple to produce the screen is almost certainly closer to $100-$200.

Where are you getting this number from? Why not $50, or $300?

So many people commenting on OP's post essentially gaslighting them for not wanting to pay $1000 for a screen repair, as if we dont live in a universe where replacing screens on every other product is 1/3 that cost.