Want to service your own Macintosh? Don't even bother trying.
A good portion of today's Mac users are obviously switching from the Microsoft Windows world, and in their own time were used to many givens in that world. One of those givens was the ability to be able to literally rip open a PC and fix, tinker and repair your way to a working computer. I often hear of PC users replacing motherboards, modding cases, adding and subtracting hard drives and optical drives, but, I rarely ever hear a new iMac owner saying things like "Wow, I just replaced my logic board and upgraded the processor while I was in there for the fun of it," or, "Boy, my 2 terabytes of hard drive space spread over my 4 hard drives really makes my Mac much better to work with." The reason you don't hear these statements coming from a Mac user is simply because Apple doesn't want nor allow you to easily perform these types of upgrades or repairs on most Macintosh hardware.
Ever since the early days of the Macintosh, Apple has had a love-hate relationship with those users who have technical backgrounds enough to repair or upgrade their own machines. The stories call back to the days when there were fights within the early days of Apple as to whether to allow something as simple as a ram upgrade to be handled by the customer or, whether to even allow expansion slots in the early Macs. Often, the company won this battle owning to the fact that customers tinkering around inside machines could bring the said computer to its demise and hold the company responsible for any futher repair work. So, the expansion slots and various other upgrades just weren't offered on most Macintoshes, and even to this day, repairing or upgrading your own Mac is often either impossible or very difficult compared to the average PC.
Most veteran Macintosh users are fairly savvy when it comes to upgrading or making simple repairs on their computers. For whatever reason, this concept seems to be lost on this select pool of users who could do these upgrades and repairs without having to bother the Apple service centers. Does Apple purposely design the computers to be impossible to work on for any specific reason? In the last five or more years, Apple has built its entire business on converting the masses from the PC world to the Macintosh world, however, one of the very reasons it can be useful to work on the PC is the fact that you can easily change out mostly any part you wish. I feel strongly that Apple has either lost sight of this fact, or, there's an underlying reason as to why it's just plain difficult (or next to impossible) to swap out any parts on a Mac, except ram.
Oddly enough, during the reign of the iMac G5, (now discontinued, of course) Apple allowed full customer access to the innards of the computer for the very first time, other than previous pro-level G4 and G5 towers here and there. Even better, a customer could order replacement parts for the iMac right from Apple, including power supplies, optical drives, and even logic boards if you were so inclined to swap these out yourself. I thought that was a revolutionary step for Apple, allowing complete access to any part of the machine, and even encouraging you to attempt these repairs yourself with detailed guides to help you along. Unfortunately, almost as soon as it began, those particular iMacs were discontinued in favor of the newer iMacs which now included the integrated iSight cameras. Now if you have ever seen the take apart guides for the iSight iMac, you will be utterly amazed on how anti-repairable these machines are. You literally have to open the machine by jamming a credit card into the back ventilation slot to try to disengage the hidden tabs that may or may not even be reachable. This can take upwards of at least ten minutes just to get the back case off. Then, you have to remove hidden screws around the display to get to the guts of the machine without damaging the video cables first. Now, on a similarly-equipped PC, a simple hard drive swap would take you roughly five to ten minutes, not counting the Windows installation. As I mentioned, it can take ten to fifteen minutes just to get the back case of these iMacs off!
Apple needs to make this the final nail in the coffin of trying to get the masses to move to the Macintosh; simple repairs. I don't want to have to take my machine to the repair center every time a logic board or hard drive blows apart and I'm sure PC users feel the same. Allow the users to get in and get their hands dirty with repairs or upgrades; if they damage anything then they can be responsible for it. Chances are, if they damage something, given easy access, they can simply repair it themselves instead of being blamed by Apple that they broke it while tinkering around inside the machine. At the very least, allow the users access to the main components such as the hard drive and optical drives with easy to access panels. This would cut down useless trips to the service centers, which are clogged up with repairs that could easily be attempted by the more savvy users who aren't afraid of the screwdriver.