Was this the case where the screen cracks on its own? You seem to [edit, reworded] be much more angry about it than I'd be if I'd damaged the computer myself.
If you buy a car, hit a kurb and destroy a wheel, wouldn't you be annoyed if it was only the manufacturer that could fix it, and they would charge you 70% of the price of a full car?
There are myriad factors that affect repair place, especially for something as technologically advanced as the newest laptops. Labor prices, design of the laptop, parts supplies, etc.
Of course, the ability for only one entity to source and supply those will tilt the scales towards a higher price, but that is unrelated to the “small”-ness of the damage.
Edited words...
It's not a mere assumption. There do exist people who do many repairs better than Apple for hundreds of dollars less, in the US.
As a hypothetical, suppose the camera glass or lens was made with materials or a technique that caused it to be 90% of a phone’s cost to produce. Then replacing this item would cost >90% of the phone’s price, even though it is “small”.
Or you have a huge transport ship that has an issue with a propeller or a small part of the ship on the bottom, but it needs a dry dock to repair, and there are only a couple dry docks in the world that can handle it. Then the price could be a very high percentage of original price due to the extreme supply and demand curves involved.
Repair costs are not a simple a function of the “size” of the damage.
When I say there are people who do the repair for much cheaper I mean including the price they pay for the part, not merely their labor. Your hypothetical is not the case here.
>Of course, the ability for only one entity to source and supply those will tilt the scales towards a higher price
In general, I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect the manufacturer to make parts available more granularly than they do to their own repair centers.
The outrage is justified if the screen cracked due to a manufacturing defect. Otherwise, get over it and be careful with your stuff if you can’t afford the repair.
And before you send something off, ask questions. The shipping costs I’m sure would have been disclosed.
I don't know if you're an engineer, but if you are you probably don't take the same approach to errors in your software. Being careful is only part of the solution to reducing risk. Another is adopting practices and patterns that are less error-prone. And another is to reduce the impact of errors when they do happen.
With a software service, we might have redundancy, and a watchdog or orchestration system that restarts any instances that crash. With a laptop, we might purchase accidental damage insurance, or just decide to buy a brand that is cheaper to repair.
When humans are involved, "be more careful" is rarely a successful strategy on its own.