That would be inconvenient. However there's a lot of portable-player-with-regular-wired-headphones which might suite you. Even comes in the form of a smartphone.
Sure, but take it a bit less literally and you have wireless vs. wired heaphones. Same thing: wired headphones will just play anything you throw at them. Meanwhile wireless ones cost more, have a more limited bandwidth, sometimes require an app for settings, and are built to fail after a few years thanks to proprietary batteries.
We have the tech to solve all these issues. But that wouldn't be as profitable.
I'm not saying it's a cartel. But you can't tell me manufacturers stopped making batteries swappable in notebooks, phones, headphones and many other devices for much other than planned obsolescence. Of course they always make up some other excuse, but it's very obvious e.g. the Surface Laptop wasn't made impossible to repair for technical reasons.
It's plain as day why certain design decisions are made, and calling it a tradeoff might not be wrong, but it's clearly too kind to these practices.
I’m unfamiliar with the Surface but the unusual shape of the MacBook batteries is intentional so that it can fill almost all room. This does make it hard to also make it user serviceable.
No, it doesn't. The shape of the battery has absolutely nothing to do with how hard it is to swap. The amount of glue, restrictions on replacement parts and special screws does.
Is it? Companies have removed the wired option, forgetting that current wireless audio tech is abysmal in many aspects - latency, bandwidth, codecs, Bluetooth being an awful spec. Yet in their book it was comparable enough to replace wired completely.
