You can replace your battery, it just takes a bit of time and effort. Ditto the screen. RAM is tough because it's soldered in, but at least they have a good excuse for making the batteries and RAM that way: they want to make their stuff smaller.

Right to Repair did show up pretty loudly with Apple devices when the Error 53 controversy happened, where people's phones would refuse to boot after having the home button replaced. Thankfully, it appears this was an honest mistake and it has been fixed. It does show how losing the Right to Repair would actually look, though: not just stuff that's hard to replace because of design constraints, but devices which arbitrarily refuse to accept unauthorized replacement parts.

iPhones are reasonably easy to repair some of the major components still, but Apple laptops have been getting worse in that regard, with batteries glued in and unserviceable, etc.

Right or wrong, if consumers have the choice between a thinner, lighter laptop with better battery life and a more clunky laptop that is easier to repair, most appear to be choosing the former over the latter.

Consumers have very little choice. Especially with Apple, which releases whatever it wants and people buy it anyway. But with laptops and smartphones and other electronics, the "choice" often is that some phone operator or big electronics store chain randomly decides it's "Thin Device Era™" or something, and discounts a particular subset of devices. And people don't wait forever to buy a new device, they usually need one "right fucking now", so they choose from what's available.

The two are not mutually exclusive. I don't think gluing everything together is purely engineering decision.

Glue allows them to attach battery to the body. Macbook's battery is not single piece, rather is few batteries connected with each other shaped in a ways that allow them to fill all empty space within the body.

Some other current models achieve this in a different manner, with a molded cage that holds the individual batteries in place throughout the body but can be removed.

There are tons of third party repair shops for iPhone. It's also easy to do at home, I replaced my battery not too long ago.

Apple definitely has that reputation, but I don't think its deserved in my experience. They user manuals for machines with replaceable parts often describe exactly how to do it. For other things that require a tiny bit of skill or where an unskilled person could easily mess things up, they put up a minor barrier like a different screw head, the tool for which will often ship with replacement parts.

It's absolutely deserved. The things that are officially user serviceable now are very minimal, and the tamper-resistant screws and glues used aren't to protect devices from their users (which would also be a bad idea), they're to prevent people from taking advantage of a cheaper alternative to paying Apple for out of warranty repair service. You cannot buy things like batteries from Apple, and Apple will not provide you with tools to bypass their tamper-resistance efforts. Only third party sources will do that.

Even when others cared and decried the walled gardens...

...I used to not mind when I couldn't open my iPod Classic to replace the battery, because failures like this rarely occurred and when they did Apple repaired them easily...

...then when I started to need to care, there were no brands left that cared for me.

Haha, thank you for this :')

I've never gone to the genius bar to get stuff done because of this. There is always an enterprising college student (often ex-Apple) willing to get just about anything done on the cheap, on my time.