Secondly, laptops are built very differently, from brand to brand. And whilst its true that most have their microphone cables in a similar position, the difficulty and method of accessing it can be very different. On a Clevo laptop it's essentially trivial. On every Asus I've tried it with, getting under the keyboard has been painfully inconvenient.

I have had several laptops, Lenovo, Mac, my fiansee has a Dell, and in each of them I found the mic and removed them easily. It's really not that hard, there are plently of youtube tutorials how to open the case, and of course safety guides to not damage the board or hurt yourself.

I've been removing the mic for about 10 years now, even before the Snowden revelations. It was just common sense to me that anything can be hacked, and having a mic and webcam spy on you passively is not fun.