[nickflood]

Yes, they could. Look at Dell XPS 13 9310. It has the battery that's not glued in (using screws) which you can get a replacement for 70-150 bucks and change youself. It has trackpad and keyboard that are replaceable separately. And the SSD is slotted so you can upgrade the drive or recover data when stuff happens and your motherboard dies. Meanwhile, it has great screen, is very light (1.1kg) and thin. The battery life is on par with Intel macs as well.

In 15" laptops you additionally now get a slot for a second hard drive and upgradeable RAM without sacrificing much in terms of thickness (look at XPS 15 9500).

[emteycz]

I had XPS 15 before I had the current M1 Macbook, and before that I had the previous gen XPS13 for a very short while - I had to return that, I couldn't work on it at all due to overheating/thermal throttling. XPS laptops are incomparably worse machines and opting for that instead of a Macbook was my greatest mistake that I'll never repeat (I also really tried to like Lenovo machines, but that ship has sailed too - I'm going Apple only since this Dell experiment).

I never lose any stuff on my Mac thanks to the seamless integration of iCloud. And the motherboard fire that happened to my XPS15 destroyed the SSD anyways...

About the screen... Don't even talk about that. I was so angry when I first saw it - I paid big bucks for the best screen Dell offers and yet it's so much worse than the screen on cheapest Macbooks (I moved to the XPS from Macbook 2015 - even that old machine has a much better screen). It was flickering when I enabled dark mode in my editor (not a faulty machine, I tried to return it and they have shown me that every machine does it)!!!

And no, the battery life is nowhere near the 2015 Macbook Pro, and absolutely nowhere near the M1 Macbook. The ads say so, but it's totally not true - my MBP2015 still can sustain 6 hours of work with the original battery, while the XPS was dead after 6 hours of not doing anything.

And to top it all off, the whole XPS was creaking even if I just put my hand on it, and raising it into the air made sounds so terrible people around me were having amused looks! None of my Macbooks ever made any sound like that - or any other unpleasant sound whatsoever.

[nickflood]

All good points, thank you!

Yeah, I kind of tuned the issues out because for me the XPS is the only machine that combines slickness with repairability and that's what I value. I have the skill to resolve some of the issues (I always do a wipe and a fresh install) and the rest I learn to walk around through time.

I agree that the XPS is a terrible computer for a person who just wants stuff to work, but my point was that nothing prevents Apple from following the same repairability practices that Dell has while having a better QA. Having removable SSD or the battery that's not glued-in doesn't automatically make your laptop as bad as a Dell or as thick as a brick. If tomorrow these practices are written into the law, Apple will still be producing very good machines which will also be more maintainable.