I am thinking about my older uncle and my niece in her 20s. They're smart-enough people, and they're quite aware that a modern phone can be very expensive to fix.

In particular, I'm thinking that I (a person of reasonable technical skill) would love to help them out by changing the designed-to-be-swapped screen on the phone they dropped instead of them paying someone else to conduct surgery on it.

How many people do you know who want to change their own oil in their car? This is a frequent, required maintenance. Yet I can't think of a single car that advertises its ability to be maintained by somebody without special tools. The only people who change their own oil would have the skills to change an iPhone screen.

I have changed the battery on two iPhones on my own, and replaced one screen on my own. I've also once had one of those little shops do it, quickly and cheaply. I only did it on my own because I wanted to see how difficult it was. The savings in money and extra time was completely wasted other than for the entertainment value of changing it.

The slice of people who get entertainment value out of changing their screens, yet does not have the skills to do it on a current iPhone, must be quite small. Surely less than 10% of the population, for a "feature" that has easy alternatives of paying somebody $20-$30.

The price of replacing the screen is mostly the part itself. It’s extremely easy for any random shopping center phone store to replace in like 5 minutes. But the part itself costs more than an old phone is even worth.