Yes, they can recover your data, possibly quite easily. They choose not to.

Pretty much everyone has had a tech issue at one point or another where some device has a problem and there's some data that hasn't been backed up, and you're forced to take it into a tech repair shop, or call up tech support and have it sent in, and they tell you that the data can't be recovered.

Oh yeah? How would you fucking know? Do you know what's wrong with the phone or computer without even having looked at it, and can magically tell that there's some issue that causes the data to be non-recoverable?

It's just an outright bold faced lie. Often they'll lie to you again and tell you that they'll "TRY" to recover the data...and of course they won't.

See, the thing is that they could actually set up automated backups and put everything on a disk or a small flash drive and charge a nominal fee, and maybe if there was an issue with the board or the hard drive, they could charge a bit more for a basic recovery service.

Believe it or not, it's not actually that hard to recover data from a drive, if you have the equipment. And if they chose to be price competitive for basic recovery on a device they likely have a shit ton of spares for, it wouldn't even necessarily cost more than say $50 at most, if they weren't being dicks about it. Maybe $100. Unless you're talking about data recovery that's seriously bad, you don't have to get into the more advanced shit that the places that charge like $5000 do. Those places are more than likely overcharging for most data recovery.

Linus Tech Tips actually did a video on how they can do data recovery on hard disks not that long ago.

Of course hard drives are becoming less and less common. Now days SSD's are far more common. But even then, all they have to do is send it to a properly trained tech, and they can likely do a bit of board level repair, get your data back, and send it back to you on a thumb drive.

How many people would spend $100 for them to do this? Instead, if you bought it from Apple, they'd lie to you, tell you it can't be repaired, then they'd send it in for refurbishing, WHERE THEY FUCKING REPAIR IT and resell it, after selling you a brand new device, because they're dicks like that.

Believe it or not, I used to love Macs. But when I loved Macs, they were a different company. Every time I took in a Mac for repair, I didn't go into a fancy stupid ass store where they lied to me, I went into some guy's house where he had computers lining his walls, and talk to him for like an hour about tech things. That might not have happened every time, cuz many people did have their own shops, but it did happen a few times.

See, real techs will give it to you straight. They might not seem to be speaking English, but they won't lie to you, if they don't have to. But Apple doesn't have techs anymore. They don't even have repair shops. They just have Apple Stores, with "geniuses" that would rather sell you something new than repair what you have. Of course, some of them really would like to help you out and repair your device if they could...but they're not even allowed to...so...yeah...

Anyway, Apple isn't the only one to feed people this lie. I've heard it from a lot of companies over the years.

Unless the flash chip where you data is stored is damaged, it's probably recoverable. You just need to find someone that will do it.

The real problem is that many companies would actually refuse to honor the warranty if someone other than them tried to repair the device. This is, of course, illegal. Doesn't stop them from doing it. Not like many people would sue a company because they're being dicks over a device that cost them maybe a few hundred dollars.

There are many reasons why a company may choose not to recover your data. Maybe because a lot of humans are into some really fucked up shit, and they don't want baby rhino porn on their computers. But, you see, they shouldn't even really look at what data they're recovering. I mean, they probably will have employees that will...but that's why you have systems in place and policies to make it harder for employees to look at people's data, and easier to just automatically recover it. If you just plug it in and a script copies it for you, it's no problem. If you have no policy though, you probably have at least one employee copying everyone's pics onto a thumb drive to wank to later.

He recovered your data...he just didn't give it back to you.