The last time I called Apple the phone service employee hit me with “I understand your issue as I am also a student” when I replied that I wasn’t a student he then followed it up with “Oh, neither am I”

Yeah the support is scripted and annoying a lot of the time. There's always a song and dance like having you remove your VPN (mine is split tunnel but they don't care) to verify some failure case, loading profiles, etc. - but at some point when all avenues are exhausted they will escalate to an engineer and make detailed notes, and usually follow ups which might be with another engineer usually has a full understanding of your situation. A few times they've managed to fix these issues but it can take months.

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).

>My ISP has actual techies answering the phone

Lucky you. My ISP is so incompetent they connected me to another customer when they wanted to connect me to another support agent (Vodafone).