No surprises here. Just like the lockdown on iPhone screen and part replacements, Macbooks suffer from the same Apple’s anti-repair and anti-consumer bullshit. Battery glued, ssd soldered in and can’t even swap parts with other official parts. 6000$ laptop and you don’t even own it.
Playing devil advocate here. I owned second hand entry level first-gen MacBook Pro Retina that I bought in 2014. Still using it as my main laptop up until 2021 when I gave it to my nieces. On paper, It doesn’t have good repairability so-so specs, everything glued also, but it still working very well, battery still can last more than 4 hours, every apps still run reasonably smooth and dare I said fast.
On the other hand, my spouse bought a brand new ZenBook a year later, it has a bit better repairability, battery and ram are “easily” replaceable, and it have better specs, but the battery dies 3 years ago. Even when the battery still alive, the laptop is very unoptimized causing the fan ran all the time, consuming more electricity, and over time it becomes very sluggish. So now, it’s been hiding under closet now since maybe 4 years ago.
So I asked, what the use of repairability if at the end the component break easily. Sure you can replace it, but it just going to create more trash at the end. It’s also unoptimized so it use more energy. I take one hardened optimized laptop that can last longer versus one that can be user repairable easily but unoptimized, energy hungry, and easily break component.
The issue lies in assuming that repairable laptops cannot be optimized to the same extent as MacBooks. However, this assumption is inaccurate. While there might have been a problem with your Asus ZenBook, I can assure you that if you were to select a Windows laptop priced similarly to a MacBook, you would find a comparable level of optimization. Additionally, there’s the added benefit that you can swap out the battery when it starts going bad and upgrade the RAM and storage if you need to in the future
So you’re drawing the conclusion that a more repairable device is inherently going to be worse than a less repairable device but that’s not true.
A sample size of two is hardly statistically relevant. Especially because you’re completely discounting the possibility that you were unusually lucky with your Mac or unusually unlucky with the Zenbook.
Gluing the battery in, in no way makes it last longer. The biggest problem here seems to be that the fan profile is not optimised, but that won’t have a significant effect on the battery because while it increases charge discharge cycles, it doesn’t increase them by that much. You probably just had a dud battery.