I don't think laptops should be designed to optimize relatively rare events like battery swaps over day-to-day use. My MacBook Air is 8? years old and I've never cracked the case.
If it's common for MacBook batteries to last 3 years as it has for you, that's a far bigger concern than the fact that it's difficult to replace. I think that's pretty uncommon though, I don't have numbers either way.
You may want to pop it open and blow the dust out of the fans. They need annual maintenance to run at full efficiency. You might even notice the speedup in your computer if the CPU has been running slower to keep the heat down.
You're assuming the only reason to replace a battery is to replace it because it is faulty but back in the day people used to just carry spare batteries to increase capacity.
Now we're limited to those crazy plug-in power banks that don't work on most laptops anyway.
If you could still carry a spare battery, a lot of people would.
> ... back in the day people used to just carry spare batteries to increase capacity
"Back in the day" batteries lasted 2 hours or less and even then I didn't know many people who bothered buying a spare. The extra weight and expense weren't worth the trade-off.
Now with 8+ hour battery life, the trade-off is even worse.
Well it's only my anecdata vs your anecdata but that wasn't my experience at all. In the 90s through 2000s it was extremely common for people who primarily worked on laptops while travelling to have a "laptop bag", inside which you'd carry your power adapter, whatever PCMCIA cards you needed, a mouse, and a spare battery.
It wasn’t that long ago that our agency had thousands of people with laptops who travelled often (2007). We used to give them two batteries, a home charger and a car charger. You could get almost four hours on a full battery and that was not running a ton of software and no WiFi or wireless. Seemed common if you travelled to have more than one battery. Now it seems like you just want one of those battery backups to bring with for times when you don’t have a plug nearby.
> Well it's only my anecdata vs your anecdata but that wasn't my experience at all.
Indeed and much likely depended on use-cases.
But battery life is vastly different now regardless.
> PCMCIA cards you needed
LOL do not miss those. I did have a sweet PCMCIA network card because Linux didn't support the onboard NIC. Back in the days when you had to scour 30+ web sites to find a laptop you could run Linux on reliably.
Interesting argument. If people didn't bother buying a spare even when battery life was shorter, maybe longer battery life doesn't really matter all that much. ;-)
Incidentally, I had a spare that I brought along when traveling. When I wasn't traveling, I generally didn't need the spare, but it was great when I did need it.
If it's common for MacBook batteries to last 3 years as it has for you, that's a far bigger concern than the fact that it's difficult to replace. I think that's pretty uncommon though, I don't have numbers either way.