You hit the nail on the head, Chris. The increasingly irritating elimination of removable batteries from absolutely every portable Apple product is a case in point. The original argument for doing this (‘removable batteries make it bigger’) is total bunkum when applied to the new model Macbook Pros. They are no smaller than they were before, at least not in any practical sense: and besides, the design goal isn’t “unreasonably small” but “professional users”. Despite the complete lack of any practical excuse for it, the batteries in new Macbook Pros are no longer user replaceable. Yes, if you want to give up your computer for several days, you can have it replaced at the shop… but that is just crazy.

And it does nothing to resolve the real problem- if you need extended battery life, you can’t just pop out the used battery and pop in a spare. You are dead in the water. The real reason for not having removable batteries? Well, I guess it acts as a sort of backhanded encouragement to buy a new iPhone/iPod/computer ever two years when the battery becomes unusable: one could argue that is the real reason. But I suspect it is not such a logical albeit evil reason: no, I think it is just a dislike of anything with removable parts, and a design ethic taken to unreasonable extremes.

Note that I own and enjoy several Apple products (a 2007 MacBook Pro, an iMac, an Apple TV, a TimeCapsule, and an iPod), but I’m not blinded to their flaws. I must have been sick the day Apple came around to dose me with their Reality Distortion Field.