Disclaimer: ex apple engineer with apple stock still.
The perspective inside for the rank and file was dominated by concern about hackers and stolen iPhones for the touchid security. Apple was trying to get people to trust their medical records and finances to the device (a massive market opportunity) and so took an extremely paranoid approach to how replaceable the hardware was, to prevent trivial exploits. The repairability market was small peanuts compared to that, and I genuinely believe that no one wanted iPhones to be harder to service vs other phones.
I'd be more willing to accept the security justifications for bad repair-ability if it didn't extend across their entire portfolio and to their authorized service providers. Why do AOSPs have to replace entire mainboards (CPU, memory and all) instead of individual components on the iMac?
"The repairability market was small peanuts compared to that, and I genuinely believe that no one wanted iPhones to be harder to service vs other phones."
You've contradicted yourself a bit here. You said that Apple was willing to forgo repairability in order to chase a new market. So, while making the devices hard to repair wasn't the primary goal, it certainly was something they wanted to accomplish in order to service a goal that was more appealing to them -- so they did want the devices to be harder to service.
"is sounds a lot more like that non-Apple repairability getting harder is simply a side product."
Yes, that was what I understood. What I'm saying is that it's hard to assert that "no one wanted iPhones to be harder to service" when they've intentionally made the decision to make iPhones harder to service. Yes, making them harder to service was not the primary goal, but they chose to do it in order to achieve a different goal -- therefore they wanted iPhones to be harder to service.
I think you and the decision-makers were entirely sincere, but good intentions can still result in market failures.
As a side note it's baffling tome that a firm like Apple would go all in on touch ID given the numerous demonstrations in movies and TV of how that would likely be abused, many of which have made the jump from fiction to reality.
The perspective inside for the rank and file was dominated by concern about hackers and stolen iPhones for the touchid security. Apple was trying to get people to trust their medical records and finances to the device (a massive market opportunity) and so took an extremely paranoid approach to how replaceable the hardware was, to prevent trivial exploits. The repairability market was small peanuts compared to that, and I genuinely believe that no one wanted iPhones to be harder to service vs other phones.