>can't be turned by readily-obtainable screwdrivers

$11 from newegg. Including shipping. Unlikely, however, to be readily available to an inquisitive 5-year-old, who might easily do more damage to some expensive electronics than he meant to, if he could get it open.

Oh, come off it. Have you really had a 5-year-old open your electronics? If they find a screwdriver they can stick it through the screen just as easily whichever screws Apple uses, and that seems like a more likely damage path.

I was a 5-year-old with a penchant for opening electronics, so I'm fairly sure they exist. However, I'd be more worried about adults doing more harm than good by taking apart/putting things back together in an attempt to 'fix' it before going to someone that knows what they're doing.

Also, many people ignore that most of those crazy looking screw drives also have benefits such as better cam-out resistance.

Things like torx have such benefits, but does Apple's crazy pentalobe nonsense really have any benefits besides being uncommon?

yes, and yes, here's a picture of my XO-1 that went viral

http://gizmodo.com/373124/kids-are-tearing-apart-the-olpc-la...

The ease of disassembling OLPCs is intentional http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/03/5-year-olds-repair-olpc-l...

Using regular screws would be pointless; there's nothing you can do inside the case.

It would almost certainly be cheaper, so they must stand to profit somehow by making it harder to open the devices.

At their volumes, it wouldn't be cheaper in any meaningful sense.

That depends how you define meaningful. It obviously required more resources than simply using standard parts and tools, so there must be some payoff.

I'm guessing that every piece of their kit and manufacturing capacity is custom made to order. The difference between making their custom screws use one shape of head vs. another is probably negligible in terms of cost to them.

Yes, you said that already, and even though you haven't provided a shred of evidence I'll let it go, because even then there still must be a payoff for them to do it. Someone went to the engineers and said "Do this differently," and they didn't do it for laughs.

I was making my implications explicit. I'm saying that your original thesis that manufacturing cost was a significant deterrent to doing it differently was wrong, because they're never going to use regular screws, they're going to make them custom to fit the case, so making them with a different head is not an issue of manufacturing cost at all. But sure, there must be some reasoning behind their decision, most things they do are deliberate. If there's nothing user-serviceable, then they probably save money from people trying to open their computers up, screwing them up, and then trying to pass off the problems as manufacturing defects. I don't see anything nefarious in that - their user upgradeable computers are really pleasant to get into.

You can buy Torx screwdrivers in any half-decent hardware store or any number of online merchants.

Apple no longer uses Torx on the external screws.