Support call center is operation cost. They did they math and think this will save them more money than losing a few angry or disappointed customer.
At that point the main problem for a service is to figure out when they are dealing with someone who could solve the problem through the website, and when they are dealing with someone whose problem is too complicated to be solved that way. Although it also seems like many people don't want to spend the money on doing that analysis and serving their customers, as you have pointed out.
I use a Surface Go at home (running BlissOS) and a Surface Pro as my work "laptop" (running Debian KDE). I forget which generations they are, but they're probably 8-ish years old, so if they haven't died yet, they're probably good. They both work well for what I use them for, and are better laptops than actual laptops for what I need a laptop to do.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-lapt...
But as for getting rubber feet, I'm sure it's some backwards process with Apple too, if at all possible.
My ISP has actual techies answering the phone, and their approach is more "well that's a bit crap, I can have an engineer there by Thursday". I've only needed them a couple of times in a decade, but I've been left with a mile-wide grin both times. As long as that's true, I'm a customer for life.
When I submitted an AppleCare replacement request for it, the employee said “Oh man, I hate it when that happens!” and approved it.
I figure that’s the script, or maybe he had a chronic issue of running over his own phone.
For hardware issues too it's pretty good, though I've only ever dealt with the Genius bar, and never done a mail in of the product in question.
For software I've never really seen this kind of service at scale, e.g. with Microsoft. And for hardware, it's essentially chatbots in a loop these days which I experienced with Lenovo trying to get support for a laptop that wouldn't power on (never managed to get a human to support me and gave up).
Lucky you. My ISP is so incompetent they connected me to another customer when they wanted to connect me to another support agent (Vodafone).
Surface-linux has done a ton of work to get some support, but yeah: they are quite the special devices:
> In contrast to other devices, however, some newer Surface devices route their keyboard and touchpad input via this controller. Unfortunately, every new Surface device requires some (usually small) patch to enable support for it, since devices managed by SAM are generally not auto-discoverable.
There is a huge feature matrix, so at least you sort of know what you are getting. Amazing work from open source folks! https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Supporte...
Also, USB-A in 2026? Really? That was already an automatic disqualifier for me at the start of the decade.