Apple has already explained this: removing moving parts has allowed them to reduce a lot the space needed for the battery. Machining their hardware from a solid block of aluminium makes it also a lot sturdier.

Here is a video featuring Jony Ive about the unibody design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJx6cF-H__I

Specific explanation regarding the unremovable battery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD6sh9purb0

Original page about the unibody design: https://web.archive.org/web/20100414070055/http://www.apple....

This article from 2012 sheds some light on the issues/tradeoffs related to glued batteries: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/recyclers-disagree-on-i...

Thanks - I recall reading that originally when it came out (though I seem to recall one of the Apple recyclers getting in trouble for complaining about Apple's glued-in system - not in this article though.)

You'd wonder if it's really that difficult to add a strap, instead of glue to secure a battery.

Thanks - I watched the videos - it's more about the Unibody Aluminum design. I'm wondering why the memory and flash components are no longer modular, and if that's going to be the trend for everyone.

The reason is the same: space. Not having standard physical interfaces to plug hardware in represents a huge gain in space.

For instance, if the MacBook had a standard SSD, it would need the following:

- A SATA controller chipset on the motherboard

- The physical connector on the motherboard

- The physical connector on the SSD

- A SSD controller designed for SATA

- Maybe even a plastic enclosure on some laptops

Instead, Apple can use a lower-level interface, embed the flash controller and directly put the NAND cells on the motherboard. That's two chips.

The decision that Samsung took is interesting because they used to actually market the removable battery as a feature. The Galaxy series was one of the few high-end smartphones that had this.

It makes me wonder how much of the "we do this because it's what our users want" is what users genuinely want, and how much of it is actually the company using marketing to tell users what they want.

How about a third option? "We do this because it's what our users say they want."

Of course, users lie, and although they say they want a replaceable battery, almost nobody actually replaces the battery. You wind up making a huge design sacrifice to implement a user-swappable battery that nobody swaps.