You can have both thin, sturdy, and replaceable batteries.
It really isn't that hard. Maybe a few extra days of design and development by a team of engineers. If that... Once you come up with your preferred design, it more or less can be replicated to every other similar device.
That's not how engineering works. There are good designs that can't be achieved while making things replaceable. For example, the reason screen glass often isn't replaceable is because it's optically bonded to the underlying LCD, which improves sharpness, reduces glare, and reduces parallax when using a pen. The reason batteries usually can't be replaced is that it saves space and weight to use naked Li-Poly battery packs molded to the available space. Making say a back case removal reduces structural rigidity and reduces space available for a battery. That's engineering--making trade-offs between features people may not care about in favor of features they care more about.
I'll be interested to know if it applies to things like AirPods, those would be more challenging to redesign with replaceable batteries (though obviously not impossible).
A good argument for having replaceable batteries is that this recall could be done by just sending new batteries to everyone. Now, they have to replace entire devices.
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