Oh no! So Apple is trying to save people money through all this? We've been so blind to their goodwill...
I like how you change the discussion topic so easily. We went from discussing whether Apple is the worst R2R offender to discussing the quality of their products and now the discussion is about my assessment of precisely what percentage of what Apple does is out of spite instead of other lame excuses to prevent people repairing their products.
The entire discussion is about bad patterns of behavior that have emerged over the years from a particular company called Apple. The history of Apple's behavior is long and people are not going to waste time rehashing it all over again here, especially not when you're already aware of past events and yet only begrudgingly acknowledge their existence as isolated events when others force you to. That makes having a genuine conversation about the topic pretty infeasible.
Yes, there is long history of behavior, but I think that there could be more discussion about why Apple does things than just assuming bad behavior. I was trying to give alternative explanations than just "apple is being bad as usual."
Can you name a single advantage of pentalobe screws over pre-existing standard screw heads like Torx? If not, then Occam's razor is how I know.
Really tiny Torx screws are easy to strip the head on. I've done it more than once, to my considerable regret.
Pentalobes are harder to strip, because a pentagon is less like a circle than a hexagon is.
Are they the Platonic ideal of a screw head for the exact size used in iPhones? No idea, I'm not a mechanical engineer. Just a klutz who has stripped a few tiny Torx screws with my big ol' meat hands.
How do you know that it is to spite repair? Apple certainly knows that you can buy those screwdrivers for less than $10 from iFixit for the last 6 years. If it was to purely spite us, you'd think they'd make them more complicated or change them every year.
Instead, a more likely scenario is that it is to prevent people who have no idea what they are doing from following a YouTube tutorial, being overconfident in their abilities, opening a machine, doing more damage, and then having a more expensive repair. Or to prevent my curious 10-year-old from opening the machine just because he wants to have a look and then breaking something. Which is a whole argument entirely as to whether that is warranted, but it isn't necessarily spite.
Error 53? Another example where the actions may be excessive, but it isn't necessarily spite. Can you imagine what a hacked fingerprint sensor could do? If I was a scammer, I'd set up my booth in the mall and swap all my client's fingerprint scanners with fake ones. Yes, Error 53 was an extreme reaction to that risk, but you can't say it was sheer spite.