the real problem is that you can't keep all those little features you'd wish for in your head, so while you are making a buying decision they don't factor in as much as the lower price achievable without those features.

Perhaps we need government labels like we have on food - little boxes for common things like “battery: removable” or “on/off”.

I'd love this - simultaneously beneficial to consumers, improving the market (reducing information asymmetry), and not something that laissez-faire-market-types can complain about (because you're not restricting what sellers can do, technically - you're just forcing them to reveal more information about their product, and then it's market forces that actually deal the killing blow).

More ideas: "online account required for use", "collects location data", "phone call required to cancel subscription", "memory use: 350 MB" (just like calorie counts!), and so many others...

We'd need some regulation for the regulations. My son's laptop battery died last week. Today, it is considered non-removable. But, he did remove it, after removing about 20 screws, carefully prying open the case, removing a few more screws and layers of insulation inside. Eventually, he was able to remove it and test that the battery was the fault and order a new one.

If we require labels, without the necessary strictly defined definitions, today's non-removable battery becomes tomorrow's "removable" battery. Because, hey, it is possible to remove it. Good luck getting everything back together if you aren't an engineer or extremely careful in how you disassembled things.

If a battery is "removable", that means replacing the battery is a normal, reasonable use of the device. Ergo, if the device breaks while the customer is replacing the battery, the manufacturer would need to replace it under warranty.

"Field replaceable" might be better way to describe it. If my flashlight runs out of power, I unscrew the tailcap, take out the 14500 cell, and put another one in it. I don't need tools and I can do it in the dark; it would be a major flaw for a flashlight if I could not.

I've advocated similar as a possible way of countering other consumer-hostile practices in the past but for something like batteries I think we're already past that point.

E-waste is a huge but so far mostly overlooked problem. Built-in obsolescence is great for exploitative businesses and bad for basically everyone and everything else. Unnecessarily restricting hardware repair or replacement might be the largest contributory factor in this problem.

Time to regulate.

That varies a lot based on product type, price point, and target market.

For something long-lived and expensive, I will pay extra and accept a less sleek design for standardized removable batteries. I research most purchases of durable goods. Of course, I may not be the most profitable customer since I don't plan to buy a new widget every six months.

This is the real problem. Otherwise the markets would have solved the crappy products problem a long time ago.

When I use something at my home, I usually have a constant stream of minor annoyances that could easily be fixed by the manufacturer. However, when I'm shopping for a new product, I dont remember any of them.

The odd part is that for many people that's even the case if it's software _and_ they are programmers themselves _and_ it's open source. But they go complain instead of just fixing the minor annoyance.