Actually, their oldest laptops with captive batteries and iPhones aren't 5 years old yet. I have an iPod that's older than 5 years that still holds a decent charge, though. To be honest, when it stops doing do so, I'll be wishing I could pop a new battery into it easily.

EDIT: Apropos of our discussion, I see that Apple just added these battery info pages to their site:

http://www.apple.com/batteries/ipods.html
http://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html

Nobody operates in a vacuum. Not that they're slacking, but I'd love it if someone leapfrogged Apple in the UI area. Competition is a very good thing.

There isn't much competition in a oligopoly. You are not going to see any innovation from any new companies . The barriers to entry would be extremely high and the market share is already dominated by a few companies. Hopefully companies like Apple and MS continue to use their sub-normal profits to innovate.

Good point.

Credit where Credit is due.

My wife took over my old 5MB Creative Zen. A wonderful little MP3 player if you could get used to the finicky touch pad. At the time, the replaceable battery was a check mark on my shopping comparison list although I actually expected that by the time the battery went bad, I'd probably just want another one.

Well, I did buy another couple more since then but the battery lived on. Until last month when my wife took it home from work and said it won't charge anymore. Just for fun, I dug up the papers my wife religiously files away for me cause I'd lose them and emailed the support address to see if a battery was even available anymore. I said I would provide a VISA number if the price was reasonable and they gave me a number to call.

6 days later, after giving up and showing her how to use my old Zune, I got a 1 liner email response. "You send address, please." Just for fun I did and about 2 weeks later, I had a new battery from a company in California that I have never heard of before.

At the time, Creative was playing the "Our battery is replaceable" card pretty heavy, but I didn't actually expect to ever get one replaced. Kudos to them!

Most of my credit is due to Visa...

Mine too.

I've often wondered how Blackberry managed to stay below everyone's radar, and off of the wanna be hit lists. After all, when you look at the usual pundits... Apple, Bose, Monster Cable, MicroSoft... They are all heavy weights in their field, thus everyone takes a jab at them (bigger you are, the easier the target). But for the most part, even though Blackberry dominates the smart phone market, most people (even iPhone users) don't bag on Blackberry very much.

Not that I mind at all, since I've used Blackberry's for years now, I just never understood how I got away with it for so long. I really thought once Blackberry made the mistake of taking on the iPhone head on with the Storm, and lost miserably (too thick, too slow & no improvements over the iPhone if that's your thing) that they would receive a lashing. But nothing really became of it. Blackberry users continued to be Blackberry users, iPhone users continued to be iPhone users almost as if the showdown never even happened.

Which in today's day and age is just a little bit... odd?

True, but I see them as very different products. The BB is tailored to the executive or mobile manager types who want instant, no frills synchronization with their Microsoft Outlook or equivalent. The full (push button) qwerty keyboard that many of it's models have is also demanded by many of these folks.

The iPhone does emails but full synchronizing with Exchange Server proved difficult at first (I'm assuming it's no problem now)and the touch screen keyboard was seen as an inconvenience by the BB type folks.

Both are great products but I think it's a good example of how they are catering to two very different personality types and business needs.

Indeed, which is why I thought it was a HUGE mistake to unleash the Storm, expecially if it wasn't competetive with the iPhone, which it really wasn't. There was a huge market to capture (all those who owned iPhones because they were the 'IT' phone, and not because they were Apple lovers), but they didn't sway anyone over because not only was it not as good as the iPhone, it wasn't even as good as most other Blackberrys.

I would have thought they would have scrapped it instead of launching a failure, since it made them look desperate not to fall behind to the iPhone. But Apple made the mistake of restricting themselves to AT&T, so Blackberry was never in jeopardy of falling behind really anyway. So why even bother? I've never thought most Blackberry users to be people particularly worried about having the 'IT' phone, just a good working business tool, which most Blackberry's (besides the Storm) are.

To me it seemed like a big mistake, but nobody really seemed to notice.