@Mark_the_Harp

I'll tell you even more fun story.

Get any air purifier (with various filters, etc).

After this try to replace filters, usual price for them is astonishing (for some brands it is equal to new purifier total price)

Same thing goes in many many areas.

@driftwood

You just need to understand that in current system all measures that you see in my post are impossible to implement.

@svart

Thing is that it must be standards for all this, and under unacceptable chipped batteries I mean proprietary chips. No one prevent you to use chips helping with charge and indentification that are made according to standard.

I agree with most of your points in the initial posting, but one is certainly over the top: "total price of all parts must be no more than original product price" - it is obviously expensive to sustain a stash of spare parts, and being required to sell them individually makes logistics and storage even more expensive. Let's say the "sum of all spare parts must not exceed 3 times the original price" - that would be more realistic

It is not. Main goal for this is to make it very hard to make big sudden changes, as each such change requires to keep producing old spare parts with new parts.

That's why modern Nikon lenses have printed number "10" in the recycling sign. It should mean they won't last longer than 10 years. It is not true, as professional lenses by Nikon are done to last much much longer, but the company has no obligation of producing spare parts for another 25 years. It is up to their good (or bad) will.

@Mark_the_Harp

Hmm.

One issue is that if you have credits available and do not use them, you are usually at disadvantage to competition.

Same with consumer economy. As fixing industry is almost non existent, by going this route you reduce division of labor complexity. Hence, become less competitive.

So, I've taken the liberty of documenting a picture of the inside of a Li-Ion pack that I designed.

1: Thermal fuses and MOSFETs for cutoff. These cut off the power in/out of the cell in case of excessive charge/discharge/temperature.
2: GasGauge IC: This communicates with the charger and monitors the charge/discharge/temp/currents/voltages, etc, to make sure the pack is healthy.
3: Thermistor: This is how the gasgauge checks temperature.
4: EEprom: Stores the manufacturer battery settings for charge/discharge rates, etc.
5: Current sensing resistor array: Low ohm resistors across which the current is measured.
6: Current/charge/balance sensing: these wires sense loads and balance between cell banks to make sure that each cell is balanced to the others to ensure none of them are charged or discharged differently.
7: Specific protection IC: This IC is what controls the MOSFETs. This IC communicates to the gasgauge IC and also listens on the SMBUS for warning flags from the charging IC in case the pack needs to be disconnected for safety.

As you see, these packs are NOT simple and there is a LOT going on inside of them that you are not aware of. These protection devices are NECESSARY and are not there for making profits. If you want someone who makes profits, look at the chinese making the Li-Ion packs that do NOT have the protection installed and wait for them to fail and/or cause fire. Those packs are for profit because they WILL fail and cause a fire and those guys don't give two shits if they do or not.

Some of the smaller single celled devices and Li-poly are starting to do that because they can monitor single cells much easier. Multi-celled systems still need cell balance monitoring (monitoring each bank of cells) and it's just easier to do that inside the pack itself. I expect that as Li-Poly becomes more mainstream and the newer, safer, battery chemistries start to come out, it will happen. Some of the new small "rechargable" Lithium batteries available in common sizes, AA, AAA, etc, have special protection built into them which makes them usable without monitored protection, but they have limits on current density and size. The larger, high-density, cells still need monitored protection.

This is what happens when a Li-Ion battery is charged/discharged or simply left without a charge for too long:

The cells will spontaneously corrode from the inside and can catch fire as the lithium gel reaches the air/moisture. Luckily, these have some chemical suppression to keep that from happening but can still happen if it gets bad enough to reach the inner layers.

@Karl

Just because you can place a polymer underwater to deactivate it, doesn't mean that a battery that has been abused and the elemental lithium has precipitated out of the ionic gel won't catch fire.. Because it will. The key is that the lithium in a polymer is not the same reactivity as elemental lithium, especially the newer chemistries, as you attempted to use as an umbrella justification. These manufacturers are trying very hard to make a much safer lithium battery, not just for our good, but so they don't have lawsuits if one catches fire. Also, as lithium metal is highly reactive, once placed in water, you'll get this reaction: 2Li+2H2O=LiOH+H2. Yes, H2 is hydrogen gas, which is highly flammable. Think Hindenburg..

Anyway, the explanation to the salt water is that salting the water for the Li-Po battery is creating a medium power discharge path through the electrolysis of the water and the water itself is conducting heat away from the pack so that the cells don't go into thermal runaway. It's nothing more than that. No magic, no special properties of Li-po packs. Nothing. Unlike Li-ion cells, Li-Po packs are made from layers of plastic, foil and wire and are WATERPROOF unless scratched.. Then the same rules apply as Li-ion.

Anyway the same industry rules apply for Li-PO as Li-ion as far as safety regulations are concerned though. All else is just agenda and propaganda.

While gluing Li-po packs into devices is technically dangerous, they STILL have active monitoring and active protection systems involved. These protection systems are designed to cut the battery off if it gets too low in charge. Li-Ion and Li-PO have very low self-discharge rates unlike NiMh. Some of these Li cells can sit for years or decades before self discharging. The protection circuits are setup for being dead-man switches. Once they have tripped and turned off they do not use power from the cells, you need to give them a "wake up" current for the gasgauges to reinitialize and test the internal cells. The manufacturer simply expects you to use the device until the battery has lived it's life and you are expected to recycle it. In either case, unfortunately, the manufacturer is not liable for any disposal and doesn't typically care what happens. The industry has typically downplayed the safety hazards of Li-based batteries. There have been hundreds if not thousands of cases where batteries in laptops, phones, toys, etc have burned people or burned down buildings. They've burned up planes, hangars, cars, boats, etc, too. Trust me. I've been around folks who designed packs that burned down houses and stuff.. It's a legal nightmare.

And as you pointed out, the manufacturers didn't have recalls due to protection circuit problems, they got faulty cells. You will rarely see protection circuit faults because these are VERY heavily invested in. Manufacturers know that they are on the hook if a battery catches fire and burns someone. That's a big-time lawsuit waiting to happen. They will skimp on features but not on protection. If they do, then they shouldn't be in business. All the circuit protection in the world won't protect against faulty cells unfortunately. However, this won't stop manufacturers from designing protection circuits and making specific batteries so that people can't use batteries in improper places.

Overcharging a LI-po battery:

:)

Oh, and just for giggles, this random internet spec sheet(similar to the one you provided) says nothing about water submersion.. http://www.4-max.co.uk/pdf/dos-and-donts-lipo.pdf

@karl I don't think we disagree that safety is most important. I think what I disagree with is the implied notion that manufacturers actively and maliciously "chip" their batteries so they don't work. Of all the designs I've done across a handful of companies and of all the designs I've seen from other companies, I've not once seen a Li-ion assembly that had any kind of actual denial systems built into their electronics. I've disassembled all kinds of batteries from various laptops, consumer devices, and so forth, both for personal learning and for competitive analysis :) and have not once seen anything out of the ordinary. Battery shape may inhibit the use of battery assemblies in other devices, like the Gh1/Gh2 battery differences, but in all of the cases I've investigated there was some outstanding difference in the battery design that necessitated denying the end user from being able to generically use batteries in other devices. Most people only see similar power ratings and generic battery chemistry and then generically assume that it should work the same, but they don't know enough to know that sometimes the numbers and buzzwords they see aren't the whole story. I'll say that there are probably a few manufacturers that DO change mechanicals just to keep folks from reusing the same batteries but I'll stand behind my claim that MOST do not. Occam's Razor dictates that in this case, the manufacturer probably just needed to change for form, fit or function, or to simply fix a design issue rather than actively trying to screw a customer. The problem with this idea is that customers are fickle and they tend to get bent out of shape over the small details rather than the large issues, and in cases where they are required to spend a large chunk of money on a seemingly simple (and therefor cheap) device, like a battery, the company absolutely knows that they might lose business once a customer is outraged over the price. The problem lies with people like the Chinese who supply a dangerous but cheap product that seemingly comes at the right price point to uneducated consumers but unfortunately also has the side effect of reinforcing the idea that the cheap price is fair, even though it's not even close to being the same quality of product. This forum had a large number of complaints of folks buying the chinese batteries and using them once. Then they no longer worked. Of those that did work, many complained of erratic charge and life times and of course, no battery charge indicator on the camera. I bought a pair of them and disassembled one. No protection was offered at all and of course, no GasGauge IC, so no battery charge indicator either. The one battery I disassembled soon ballooned up so I recycled it. The other didn't even work out of the box so it got recycled too. I ended up using the little plastic cases for DC inputs into the camera so I could power it externally. So 25$ down the drain just for a little plastic case and I ended up buying a 60$ spare GH2 battery anyway.

Interesting news. It follows the consumer trend though. More people buy phones, tablets and laptops than desktops by far these days. I don't know the real numbers but based on the buying trends over the last few years, I read that it would only be a couple more years before the generic consumer stopped buying PCs altogether. I'm not sure this will proceed as planned though, I bet there will be a big push back against Intel and they'll at least keep a few options open. In any case, the last few generations of CPU from all of the manufacturers have essentially been un-balled BGA packages anyway. I think they can keep the option for balling up to the buyer and a new pressure socket will emerge. I've used testing sockets with little pins that match BGA balls so you can use a chip without actually mounting it. I've also hand soldered BGAs a few times, so I'm not too worried if I need to change it out.. :)