Passenger's smoking laptop prompts evacuation on American Airlines flight in San Francisco 

Or they could make laptops with batteries that don't spontaneously combust.

No.

The passengers weren’t listening to evacuation procedure and were trying to grab their bags.

I sense you are joking here, but in case anyone takes it literally, manufactures obviously need to make a profit, or they will cease to exist and soon have zero employees, zero products to offer and zero customers. My understanding is the cabin crew has access to fireproof bags that smoldering electronics, including laptops and large tablets, can be placed inside in order to contain any fire. I do not know difficult it would be to handle such a situation in the air though (or even on the ground) since grabbing a smoldering, melting or flaming laptop seems like it could be a little challenging. Thankfully, this incident happened on the ground, right at the gate, and not in the air.

A fire proof bag is very expensive, more than the cost of many laptops.

The staff DID tell them to evacuate using the slides

The flight attendants were in charge of the situation and opened the doors and the slides.

I was on the flight with my fiancé. The flight attendants did NOT react and open the emergency exits. There was a fire and dangerous smoke filling the plane. Hundreds of panicked passengers were all attempting to exit through the front. It was a CRUCIAL moment for the emergency exits to be utilized. I was being shoved by passengers from behind as smoke was filing the cabin. The passengers initiated the use of the energy exits. Minor injuries due to evacuation is far more less severe than folks needing to exit the plane during a fire. THREE out of EIGHT emergency exits were used to evacuate the entire plane. The flight attendant in the middle of the plane thanked the passenger who initiated the emergency exit. This situation called for the use of ALL emergency exits.