One who throws away a $2000 item without even bothering to pull the back cover off and look for something obvious like an inline fuse with a Schottky-diode clamp has already wasted far more than that on their EE education.
Must be nice to have more money than brains. Most of us don't have enough of either.
I really don't care what he built by duct-taping motors to PC-104 boards from the back of Nuts-n-Volts. If he throws away scopes and iPhones he's not someone who impresses me as a Hardware Guy.
Edit: keep in mind that his cartoon is mostly a bunch of whining about how he can't do this and can't do that because of how modern electronic equipment is made. Meanwhile, a friend in Portugal just used his homebrew wire-bonding machine to repair an 18 GHz YIG-tuned oscillator for me. (He failed this time, which is damned rare for him, but he sure didn't balk at trying.)
I do respect his generosity, though -- hopefully, some talented kid's going to get a nice present out of it. I try to help out in the same spirit when I can, because I benefited from similar generosity as a newbie.
"we need to measure differential inputs" suggests he's not at home hobbying. Maybe he's too busy to look at it, or doesn't have the right paperwork to certify a repaired one, who knows.
Apart from you, that is, who jumps straight to "he seems to have more money than me therefore he must be lazy and stupid". Maybe $2k isn't a lot of money to him and he has plenty of brains and you're just judging him by your different-but-not-more-correct standards?
Must be nice to have more money than brains. Most of us don't have enough of either.