And a display, a glass panel, speakers, multiple boards for auxilliary logic, a touch pad, a few -- well, two -- outside ports, and a lot of internal connections. All of which can break, but aren't user servicable.
Not to mention that it wasn't too long ago -- still isn't, in many devices -- that the "logic board" was not a discrete piece of hardware, but a place where you could plug in discrete components to repair and/or upgrade your computer.
Yes, you can hand your device back to Apple to get it repaired. But two or three years down the road, that's gonna be more expensive than just chucking it, at best recycling a few of the materials. If it was more maintainable, your nerdy teenage relative might have a fair chance of recovering the device instead (free laptop!).
And yes, there's a tradeoff between repairability and a host of other desired attributes -- cost, compactness, etc. Presumably Apple is judging that the market demands the latter while it doesn't care about the former -- at all. It's that totality that I take issue with.
What's more, Apple, more than any other tech company, continuously shapes what the market wants: if they brought out a series a smartphones that are user-servicable (say as a feature of an entry-level Apple Phone for emerging markets), the other manufacturers would fall in line quickly. It's rare that it works the other way round, although they've done it twice now for mobile device size, first for tablets then for phones, sort of a blow to the Apple mystique.
And of course only a fool would recognise that the manufacturers interests are not at all aligned with consumer interests regarding maintainability. Planned obsolescense is what makes this market -- a perfect storm of rapid technological progress and lack of repairability. When consumers want ever sleeker and faster devices, that's something Apple engineers can deliver, again and again. But a device that will just last them a decade is a device you only sell once in a decade.
Finally, Apple is hardly unique or particularly noteable in any of this. As usual, they're just good at what they're doing. Unless there's a surprising change in market demands, I fully expect most other laptops to look like this in a couple of years, just like most phones now come with glued in batteries and most laptop displays are fused with the front glass, turning a 30 USD repair into a 600 USD one. If anything, the fact that Apple devices are well-built and only start at the middle-end going into high-end means that people will be disinclined to just chuck them and get a new one instead.