> Once every 3 years isn't going to break the bank vs. like $50 for an X220 battery.
My Apple laptops haven't gotten frustratingly-low battery life—but, hell, still better than any PC laptop I've ever owned at purchase, even when "degraded"—until ~5 years, historically. Including the Intel ones. IDK what Apple does with their batteries (extra, "stealth" capacity? Just way, way higher-quality batteries than any other laptop or phone manufacturer I've ever used?) but they hold up better than any others I've seen. I expect the Silicon devices will fare even better, having truly stupid-long initial battery life (people who are like "LOL who the hell needs 14 hour battery life?"—this is why, if you want 8 hours of battery life after owning the device for five years; it's not just some niche oddball thing, it's about device longevity, in addition to being handy surprisingly-often in the meantime)
I think it's the "way higher quality battery". There are a lot of very low-quality non-OEM batteries, I've rarely had those last more than 6 months and they were wildly unsatisfactory even then. I managed to source a NOS OEM thinkpad battery off ebay and that was significantly higher quality than the usual junk but still, I think Apple is picky about batteries.
While on the whole I'm not overly fond of the non-serviceable battery model on laptops, I do believe Apple when they say they lose money on their repair service as a whole. I just had my iphone 8+ battery replaced after 4 years (yeah it was starting to get real bad lol), I made a point of having it done at the apple store knowing that 4-year-old glue might not want to let loose, it ended up having a different problem and they ended up replacing the whole phone with a refurb, for the $49 cost of the battery repair. Sold, absolutely came out ahead on that, was starting to get glitchy anyway and it was a refurb phone in the first place, honestly was crossing my fingers they'd break it anyway.
If you have an expensive MBP I think it'd be a hard sell to not take applecare, if you end up needing even 1 display replaced you come out ahead. That's the model, Apple really wants you on Applecare and they lose money doing it, it's all part of the package deal of ownership (which of course is not offered to secondhand owners, that's where they make the money).
It's more of a mixed bag on the cheaper models... display replacement still has a decent service charge plus the applecare fee and it's not all that worth it on a say $700 laptop. You're gonna have paid a total of like $500 anyway if you need to use it, at some point the laptop is just totaled and you get a new one. Also probably not worth it on desktops (with the possible exception of imac). But on a $3000 macbook pro? Yeah I'd do it there for sure.
The Apple Silicon models will probably also benefit from being the first(?) ones to run their entire life with Apple's new optimized charging behavior. E.g. my laptop spends most of its life plugged in running a display, and so it has its battery charging kept on hold and is occasionally charged up to ~80%. I can only assume this'll help the battery life in the long term...
Check out the application "aldente" for a tool that lets you manage this behavior directly... it can stop charging at a specific battery level regardless of what "optimized charging" wants to do, it allows "sailing" mode where it won't start recharging until the battery is discharged to a specific level, and it allows halting charging when the battery is above a certain temperature.
It does what it says on the tin in terms of system behavior at least, no idea how much it will actually help in terms of battery life.
This is not an Apple-specific feature, though. Windows 11 has a similar mode on Thinkpads, although I don't recall if it's something Lenovo-specific or it works everywhere.
My Apple laptops haven't gotten frustratingly-low battery life—but, hell, still better than any PC laptop I've ever owned at purchase, even when "degraded"—until ~5 years, historically. Including the Intel ones. IDK what Apple does with their batteries (extra, "stealth" capacity? Just way, way higher-quality batteries than any other laptop or phone manufacturer I've ever used?) but they hold up better than any others I've seen. I expect the Silicon devices will fare even better, having truly stupid-long initial battery life (people who are like "LOL who the hell needs 14 hour battery life?"—this is why, if you want 8 hours of battery life after owning the device for five years; it's not just some niche oddball thing, it's about device longevity, in addition to being handy surprisingly-often in the meantime)