Out of curiosity, am I alone in not wanting to use apple products because I find such practices as this to be unethical engineered extortion to extract more money from the consumer?

I find such things exploitive and the product's success giving a green light for other manufacturers to re-engineer their products based on less honorable principles.

For instance, on flip phones, batteries would eject if you dropped it in order to absorb impact. They were designed to fly out to minimize the damage to the device and screen. Very clever - solid engineering. However, what if if you want to sell a phone when the battery dies or make a fall break the phone so you can ... sell more phones! And now the industry no longer follows what was a very smart durability focused engineering practice.

Like the laptop in the OPs article. They could have decided to adhere it in a more clever way to make it removable instead of fusing it with glue. Screws, latches ... lots of technology was readily available.

I'm not interested in "debating" whether this is "true", clearly I'm the only one at this time, on this thread, that thinks this. I'm curious as to whether I'm just some minority of one here.