The only people who care about this are tinkerers and hackers and those with an agenda. I find it odd that people will bitch so much about this, and yet spend hours/days/weeks/whatever digging into the internals of stuff and poking around where they weren't meant to be just for the fun of it. So Apple changed their screws, huh? Instead of bitching about it and trying to turn it into an evil conspiracy plot, how about putting those tinkerer/hacking skills to use finding elegant and creative ways around it if it's so important to you?

For typical repairs, Apple offers very good warranties and one of the best return/repair services I've ever seen. It's not like you're going to save yourself a ton of time and money ordering iffy parts off eBay and tearing into the hardware yourself. If you're not doing this stuff for fun, why are you wasting your time with it in the first place?

This isn't about them trying to take away your right to modify your own hardware. There's still nothing (and likely will never be anything) stopping you from taking a hammer to it, drilling out the screws, x-raying it, or whatever. I'm sure Apple doesn't care if you want to see what's inside something you own. What they do care about is people modifying or attempting repairs and then breaking it and then trying to convince Apple it was their fault. Or passing off a broken/modified device as a legit Apple product and causing customer confusion. Or perhaps these new screws simply work better in their machines, jam up less, can be screwed in faster, whatever.