That was not the analogy. You can consider "servicing it yourself" and "taking it to a repair shop of your choosing" to be basically equivalent. If the car has

That was not the analogy. You can consider "servicing it yourself" and "taking it to a repair shop of your choosing" to be basically equivalent. If the car has been designed in such a way that a relatively common maintenance task (changing spark plugs, upgrading RAM or whatever) is now much more difficult (thus expensive because the mechanic will charge you for more hours of labour) than it otherwise would have been (or impossible) and reduces your choices of service providers then this is definitely not a good thing to the customer. Of course sometimes such design changes are inevitable trade-offs against something else. For example a laptop is less maintainable than a desktop but you gain vastly increased portability. In this case (the iMac) it's not obvious what the gain to the customer is.