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Surely there's a non-adhesive material that'd serve that purpose though, some sort of foam or rubber perhaps?

I think adhesive and screws are the only two practical options for securing a battery well enough to prevent repeated cable flexing, which is probably much more of a concern than screws coming loose.

Are you saying these were some sort of hazardous devices ready to explode at the most inexpected time?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62wUaJUh4Ko

Those batteries are glued in to their own rigid case, which makes swapping them out of the laptop trivial but also didn't leave much room for expansion inside the battery pack, and the battery pack was pretty thick compared to any recent Apple laptop.

Replacing the cells inside one of those packs would have been similarly difficult to ungluing and replacing the batteries in more recent Apple laptops, but there was a lot less reason to rebuild those battery packs.

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