The alternative is a serious hit to worldwide commerce flows.
The more I think about this, the more I feel like "As long-established trade routes become unsafe, the empire slowly crumbles..."
However, aviation experts have weighed in and stated that even a full pound of pure explosives detonated in the cabin of a modern airliner is unlikely to bring the plane down. So you could just ban very heavy laptops and leave the rest alone.
You know what HAS brought two 747s down in the last decade? Lithium battery fires in the hold. UPS and FedEx no longer permit bulk shipments of L-Ion batteries by air because of the risk. So they want to move devices from the cabin (where if they catch fire someone will notice and they can be dealt with) and put them all together in the hold where fires are harder to detect and impossible to fight!
Smart, so smart!
One explanation I'd heard was that checked bag screening areas are more secure, while for carryons a rogue gate employee could wave through a suspicious laptop without any further backup checks... or even a rogue food-service employee could smuggle something in and hand it off to a passenger. But that could happen with any 'container object,' not just laptops. And it's hard to square that a ban expanding to major European airports.
To be fair, laptops are a fairly new arrival to these long-established trade routes.
> The alternative is a serious hit to worldwide commerce flows.
One way to go about this is to segregate US citizens traveling to the US from everyone else -- literally, different flights. Allow everyone to carry laptops. If a plane explodes from a laptop-bomb, then it's very clear who the public should blame and the incentive for would-be non-citizen terrorists is pretty low.
If a citizen blows up the citizen's plane, then, well, that's pretty much the same as domestic terrorism at that point. Ban laptops for everyone?
Even so, the US isn't the first to do this. China won't let you take Li+ batteries beyond a certain mAH in your carryon.
The US already has energy limits for batteries in carry-ons[1], they're just not so boneheaded as to preclude laptops.
[1]: https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/as...
Various airlines and countries also had limits for years now. 100Wh seems to be a common number.