A youtube with an utterly idiotic grin on the front slide doesn’t make it any less illegal.

Of course, in some jurisdictions their repair contract might hold water in a court. In most it won’t, for example over here in Germany plenty of our law automatically invalidates lots of stuff a company might put in their EULAs or TOS. They are allowed to write it in there, but even if you explicitly click accept, it’s invalid and has no legal bearing, as if it were simply not in there.

But I had something similar happen before actually, where the item was “lost” basically. Net result was getting a replacement and a free upgrade for personal use (that is, I got the same phone back which was my work phone, and the better model explicitly to use personally as an apology).

But that’s the thing, they know it’s cheaper to give 1 in 50000 people a free item and/or money in return for saving 1.2% on their personel cost and training cost for service centres. That’s why they do this. They institutionalized the incompetence resulting from their lack of training and staffing.