This is a completely separate issue—I don’t know Apple’s rationale for this practice.

The issue we’re talking about is whether there are reasons to do it at all, and I still think there are obvious benefits for customers to making it difficult to put defective or dangerous batteries in their devices.

(Just to reiterate, as a technical consumer I’d prefer to be able to swap batteries myself. But I get the tradeoffs that Apple is making, and whether they make sense or not for a given company is a complicated decision that I don’t feel qualified to judge.)