Why does everyone complain about the iPhone's non-removable batteries when they end up buying a new one a year later?

I never complain about it. And one of our 2 iPhones is the 2G.

Because it’s one of the issues with Apple products that force consumers to buy new ones; if the batteries didn’t wear out, or were replaceable, people would keep them longer.

2 reasons: 1) Removing the battery on any electronic device is a foolproof way to shut it off. You don’t have to wait it to ‘power down’, and the reset buttons that many electronics have that you push with a safety pin often don’t work if the electronic is too screwed up. Removing the battery on a phone is the same as pulling the plug on your computer – you don’t have to wait for it to unfreeze to tell it to shut down or hope that the power button works. 2) iPhones (and iPods) don’t have very long lasting batteries. They tend to last no more than 2 years, which insures that people will spend lots of money replacing the battery, or just buying a new iPhone. As they are quite expensive to begin with, this can be frustrating since other phones batteries can last 5 years or more (and a replacement costs 20 dollars instead of 50–100 and can be bought at an electronics store instead of having to ship the whole phone in to Apple for them to replace for you) and many people find this process and huge expenditure to be a real problem.

The main issue is if you have a removalable battery you can carry a spare. Given that you run your iPhone flat in 12 hours if you use it alot, being able to switch to a spare battery would be useful.

Because there are lots of people who really like to complain, and Apple’s nonremovable batteries are an easy target.

I never complained about it – in my old cell phones I never had battery problems; and our original iPhones did pretty well with battery life, too. We just upgraded to the 3Gs and they use the batter more because there is more that can be going on in the background with Push and Notifications and such.

spare batterys are very useful when away from a power supply. it would be small enough to pocket easily too.