The little camera that couldn't

My camera (Nikon CoolPix 775) stopped working on Thursday. When I tried to boot it it made a weird motor sound, the lens did not come out and the screen said "System error".

When several reboots did not help, I searched on Google and found out that this is a common problem for these cameras and the way to fix it is to bring it to a trained professional and pay big bucks, which kind of sucked because you can probably get a new one for that amount of money. A couple of people, however, said they managed to fix it themselves, so I figured I could do it too.

I armed myself with a screwdriver and opened the camera. It was not a very trivial trick, because neither the front cover nor the back cover come off completely, they remain attached by ribbons that should not be broken, and also if the camera has a holding string attached it has to come off before you can open the camera. Then I unscrewed the lens thing from the camera and tested the motor that moves it and figured that the motor still works when the lens is not there. Then I put the whole thing back together, which was not easy, and I still have some extra screws left, but now it works.

After that I started wondering: how come opening a computer or a camera and trying to fix it is such a natural idea to me, but opening a washing machine seems like a weird thing to do?