since my unit is a few months out of warranty, the flat repair rate is $360.
That, or what happened to Paul Price, would drive me nuts.
If you read that
Why I quit after 40 years thread, you'd know that this is increasingly the way companies (or at least engineers working for companies that produce these tools) are required to operate. There are very, very few companies that produce tools without designed/engineered obsolescence and weak points known to fail after some time. I do not know how you have missed this, or why you thought Rigol was different.
Many members here like it that way, and do not like it when anyone questions the status quo. Quite probably a lot of their work involves that kind of design -- and I'm not referring to anyone working for Rigol, specifically; I mean there are many that depend on them being able to sell basically the same tool with minimal changes over and over again to the same customers -- and they do not like when that approach is questioned; it strikes too close to home, rocks the boat. If you are not that way yourself, you
have to ignore them, for your own sanity. If you can't, you'll break like I did; and that is definitely unfun and counterproductive.
Some members, like wraper who first answered, offered information as to how to fix the tool yourself. I'm in that camp too. If I want a tool I can rely on, I need one I can fix myself. This is why I use Linux; not being an EE, and most of the tools I use being software, I like the fact that I can customize them as I wish, and not conform to a workflow designed by someone else. Plus, the ability to create my own tools is basically built-in to the system. You'd be surprised by the stuff I can do with Linux machines, really: my imagination seems to be the limiting factor.
In the Linux world, you see the "screws behind the front panel decal" all the time. Most embedded manufacturers who provide their own Linux distribution, have simply forked the kernel, stuffed their own things in there willy-nilly, meaning that properly integrating them with the kernel so that the community would be able to maintain it is approximately as much work as rewriting the crap from scratch, and any changes made in future kernels have to be painstakingly backported by hand. See
Linux Meson for an example, or the situation around proprietary Linux graphics drivers. Raspberry Pi and Qualcomm are even worse: they hate Linux developers with a passion (because to Qualcomm, GPL is hate speech), and would prefer to only deliver binaries like Microsoft does, except that the license and the users/community does not really allow them to do that effectively. They did try hard to do that, in the beginning.
The difference between Linux and hardware tool companies is that in the Linux case, it is the Linux community that gets the blame, never the manufacturers; after all, the manufacturers "did not have to support Linux in the first place, and only did so because they want to support the community". Bullshit, they want to make money, with the least effort possible.
But that is the way business is done nowadays.(I believe one reason some German tools are often of higher quality, is because a lot of the businesses there are family-owned and family-directed, and there is less pressure to maximize short-term profits; they have to think in long-term also. I am not sure if there have been social studies about this, but you can definitely see it in how those businesses operate, and interact with their long-term customers.)
I personally don't have an oscilloscope, but am saving up to get a good one, as I do need one, for characterising power supplies for use with my SBCs (power issues cause problems especially on Odroid HC1s), designing my own microcontroller carrier/buddy boards to use with those, and so on. I realized that I'd really need to do differential probing, but only at low voltages (typically 3.3V - 12V), so that the Analog Discovery 2 would be a much better option, since good differential probes cost the same as a cheap oscilloscope. AD2 is closed-source too, so if it breaks or has bugs, there is basically nothing I can do about it; but at this point, there is no viable alternative I can find that I can afford. (An old analog oscilloscope with differential probes would be, except I don't have the skills or the equipment to fix or keep one working, or even calibrated to any degree.)