Know how I can tell you haven't designed any consumer products with a battery, replaceable or otherwise?

This is the engineering equivalent of saying, "Why doesn't someone just go to the Middle East, sit down at a round table with with the Israelis and Palestinians and Sunnis and Shiites and rebels and Baathists and Saudis and ISIS members and refugees and all those other guys, and help them work out their differences peacefully?"

Let's not pretend that Apple's hand was forced here. This is the company that dreamed up a proprietary screw to keep people out of their phones and computers.

It sounds like you’re describing the pentalobe screw, but security screws have existed for decades. Torx created variants with rejection pins in the 1970s. One-way screws have probably been around much longer than that.

And every single one of those had drivers you could buy in a pack with 50 other at Amazon for $10. They could have used any of them.

And yet, they didn't. The world didn't need yet another security screw.

Wow, Nintendo in the 1980s must have had Godlike powers, then: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=donkey+kong+battery+cover&...

Yeah, I'm sure you can build a half-trillion dollar company by selling phones in the same form factor as a Donkey Kong game.

If the market wanted such a thing, then guess what... the market would get it.

Please don't link to google searches. Everyone sees different results.

Thats besides the point. Is it possible to design phones that can be serviced in some ways by your users? the answer is clearly yes. Does Apple care about that? The answer is clearly no. They have been making designs that can't be easily opened for a long time now.