Lots of household appliances are similar to this too. If you have to repair one of the main parts of a washing machine or a dishwasher a new one will be a cheaper option.
Same for a car, a friend of mine flooded his engine by driving through water that was higher than expected. His insurance company just wrote the car off as it was much more expensive to replace an engine than to get a new car.
> This is not surprising at all, the retina screen is one of the most expensive parts of the laptop.
There is no way it costs them 2K to replace a retina screen in a 2K mac book.
Besides if Apple really wanted to they could create a more efficient and cheaper repair process for heavily damaged units. For example send them all to a central point, strip the working components and create refurbished units from those parts. For things on the outside (cover, plastics, etc.) you can use new ones because those will be scratched etc. And then give the customer the option to buy such a refurbished unit instead of a 2K screen replacement. As a bonus It's also better for the environment.
If you car is already out of warranty though, instead of scrapping it and taking whatever low ball value figure they give and buying another car, it may be cheaper to pay for the repair out of pocket elsewhere.
Filling the cylinders with water results in hydro locking an engine because the liquid cannot be compressed on the compression stroke. This can result in damaging the internal parts of the engine. Bent connecting rods are a common issue.
If you've gotten in deep enough to get water in through the intake manifold, it's quite likely that a great many other things that shouldn't be gotten wet have (wiring, interior, etc.) and it's not just the engine that will need to be replaced.
They didn't: they wrote the car off because it was flooded. That can ruin electrical systems, motors, pumps, engines, the body, and everything else the water touches.
In the US, when you contact your insurance company and say "I damaged my car driving it through water" and their appraisers agree, they're going to contact the state DMV and let them know. The DMV will mark your vehicle as flood damaged/impaired/salvaged. It's now worth the cost of scrap until you rebuild it to the satisfaction of your state laws to get a clean title.
The actual reason is they don't want Macbook components floating around on the grey market, so they make the pricing for significant repairs impossible to justify.