I don’t understand the mindset that marketing people somehow trick millions of users. Most of marketing is figuring out what people want and convincing them your product meets those needs.

There isn’t really a marketing strategy of “nobody values this but we will fight to the death to get the product designed that way so we can spend a ton of money convincing consumers to want something they don’t”.

Or, let me rephrase that, there is no sustainable marketing strategy like that. People do try (see: New Coke, Humane AI pin).

Marketing people love some metric they can use to differentiate from competition. A phone gets thinner, lighter and survives more fall height or water depth. A PC gets a faster CPU (anyone thinking back to the megahertz wars [1] or the gigahertz wars [2]?), a bigger SSD or more RAM.

[1] https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/articles/1538

[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/03/intel-revives-the-mh...

Phones with replaceable batteries use plastic, and people really hate plastic (they use "cheap plastic" as a synonym for "plastic"). So they rather buy a phone that is a little bit slimmer and has a glass back.

(Manufacturers probably also like phones that have to be replaced in a few years due to battery age.)