It depends on the component you need to service. For a battery it's usually quite easy, but that really depends.
OPs point is that in many cases, products are being intentionally designed to be difficult to service. It's one thing to introduce a complex component that's not reasonably serviceable and make it modular to replace, it's an entirely different story when you make that modular piece difficult to replace when it doesn't need to be.
This is what a lot of product vendors are doing, intentionally designing products to force vendor servicing. It's not a new trick, some auto manufacturers used to and still do it for certain cases.
Due to the complexity of the situation, there's usually ambiguity that the product needed to be designed that way to meet some specification/constraint. What usually happens is that a specification/feature/constraint that forces such designs is often sought after or identified, then the design follows suit.
These are the types of shenanigans you have accountants and financing involved in the design process of anything. They want to maximize ROI and know engineers are good at optimization problems, so ultimately, we end up with products designed to be more business friendly and less consumer friendly. I know for a fact it happens because I've been in this scenario countless times during product or service development, then someone chimes in, "is there a way we can... so we can get more money."
And even with a quartz watch a watchmaker can do a lot of things. If you provide the battery, they can exchange it, they can even service the dial and hands. Of course, servicing the quartz movement itself is not possible, but the point I tried to make was, that at least important components should be exchangeable on their own, like for example the battery in a laptop.
OPs point is that in many cases, products are being intentionally designed to be difficult to service. It's one thing to introduce a complex component that's not reasonably serviceable and make it modular to replace, it's an entirely different story when you make that modular piece difficult to replace when it doesn't need to be.
This is what a lot of product vendors are doing, intentionally designing products to force vendor servicing. It's not a new trick, some auto manufacturers used to and still do it for certain cases.
Due to the complexity of the situation, there's usually ambiguity that the product needed to be designed that way to meet some specification/constraint. What usually happens is that a specification/feature/constraint that forces such designs is often sought after or identified, then the design follows suit.
These are the types of shenanigans you have accountants and financing involved in the design process of anything. They want to maximize ROI and know engineers are good at optimization problems, so ultimately, we end up with products designed to be more business friendly and less consumer friendly. I know for a fact it happens because I've been in this scenario countless times during product or service development, then someone chimes in, "is there a way we can... so we can get more money."