I wouldn't be surprised if making the tools available was indeed a PR move by Apple to show off how difficult & inconvenient a "perfect" repair is to do. They didn't have to do it and as far as I know nobody was asking for those (opening/closing iPhones is a long-solved problem by various third-party tools) - instead the RtR crowd is asking for parts and schematics (which this self-repair program doesn't fully address - the parts catalog is minimal).
The fact that they're subsidizing the tool kits (the $1200 deposit they take is nowhere near the value of all that equipment) also suggests that they wanted regular people to get their hands on these tools (and no doubt talk about it) as opposed to charging the actual market value which - while affordable for a repair shop - would've been way out of reach of a regular user.
After all, this kind of equipment is not new and has been available for ages (comments on another thread about this say that in China every phone repair outlet had similar equipment) if you could justify buying it, and yet we haven't had articles like this on major tech news websites until Apple subsidized it enough and put it in a nice, idiot-friendly package.
The fact that they're subsidizing the tool kits (the $1200 deposit they take is nowhere near the value of all that equipment) also suggests that they wanted regular people to get their hands on these tools (and no doubt talk about it) as opposed to charging the actual market value which - while affordable for a repair shop - would've been way out of reach of a regular user.
After all, this kind of equipment is not new and has been available for ages (comments on another thread about this say that in China every phone repair outlet had similar equipment) if you could justify buying it, and yet we haven't had articles like this on major tech news websites until Apple subsidized it enough and put it in a nice, idiot-friendly package.