[_ph_]

That would already cut the amount of explosives in half. Modern laptop batteries are not exactly huge to start with. So it is much less likely to do big damage to the airplane. Add to that, it is not trivial to make a battery half the size which still has enough voltage to power the laptop - you would need cells half the size for that. And all bombings of airplanes have been done with bombs in the cargo bay.

[dfox]

Typical laptop battery has pairs of cells in parallel, so removing half of them is trivial.