Grandmastersexsay :
No, you can shape the matket by supporting products that have the features you want available. If no one bought cell phones without SD card slots, all cell phones would have SD card slots. Companies like google wouldn't be able to shove cloud computing down our throats.
Spend a few extra bucks on products that don't support the throw away life style, or atleast support it less than their competitors, and you will help improve the consumer market. People SHOULD value repairability. It is ok to value cost more than repairability, but that is not what is going on. It cost Amazon more to glue that battery down than leaving it loose and connected by a flexible lead. They are hoping you will simply get a new kindle when your battery dies. Apple does the same thing. Don't support that business model. You're an ass hole if you do. You don't just affect the consumer market for yourself. You affect it for the rest of us too.
I know you can shape the market with your choices, but you're missing the point. You've picked this one thing and said "Ok everyone, this feature of this product means you shouldn't buy it - support other stuff that doesn't do that." The thing is, you can find an undesirable trait of almost any product and use that as your blanket reasoning for not supporting it. Then you could be saying "Oh, I think I'll buy device X" and I'll respond "Don't do that! By buying device X, you support feature Y, and we want to shape the market away from feature Y!" What devices do you support? I'm sure I can come up with some bad feature about them that we should rally together to get out of the market. Will you listen to me? I doubt it, because you probably don't care about whatever deficiencies I find even if I think they're worth boycotting a product over. Should I be so arrogant to think that because I think feature Y is really bad and worth a boycott, you should agree with me? I don't think so - but that's *exactly* what you're doing here.
You've got several people in here saying that they really don't care about repairing tablets and, frankly, most people go into the rapid stream of technology not just expecting to, but wanting to, get the new device to replace the old one in a year or two. Why? Because a year or two down the road, the new device will be faster, more feature rich, and quite possibly even cheaper. People LIKE the new gadgets... So are we going to start boycotting new gadgets that we would otherwise like because they aren't made to last for a long, long time? You can, by all means, and use more longevity oriented devices. They do exist, and they exist precisely to appeal to people like you. For me, I bought a new tablet in August and it's already outdated. I fully expect that, two years from now, I'll giving it to my nephew to play with rather than open it up to try and squeeze an extra year out of it. If I were so tight for money that this were an issue, I would have went with a more repairable tablet.
If this is shaping the market in ways you don't like... Tough beans? I'll make you a deal - I won't pretend that what I care about in a tablet purchase is what you care about in a tablet purchase, and you do the same. Sound fair?
On top of that, I've had an iPod touch for about 4 years, a Le Pan II tablet about 2, and I still use both and both hold a charge about as well as they ever did. I have no idea whether they are easy to battery swap because, frankly, I've never needed to. It's not a feature that will influence my buying of a product at all. If either one starts to not hold a charge, I'd rather just let it die than even bother to learn.
PS - can you offer some hard evidence that using the glue and non-replaceable batter ups production cost of this, or any other, device, and doesn't have any other advantages over a replaceable battery?