Originally posted by E-man Manufacturers these days often intentionally build weak points into their to ensure regular product replacement. Somewhere along the line, they decided building products to last a lifetime was a sucker's bet, as far as their interests were concerned. I'm not talking just about cameras. It's common across the spectrum of consumer products. Not long after Apple brought out the first iPods, consumers began to complain about what they considered premature failures of batteries and hard drives and the inability to easily replace them. Apple responded by saying iPods were "disposable products" with a limited lifespan and were not intended to be repaired.
I'm really skeptical of that because it is very hard to engineer a weak point that doesn't turn into a huge warranty cost issue or a product quality reputation nightmare. The nature of engineering reliability is that that it's almost impossible to make a product that dies after a specific number of shots or years of use. Anything that decreases the expected lifetime of the product is going to increase the rate of failure before the warranty period and warranty repairs are horribly expensive for a company. Nor do product makers want any one specific weak point in the product because then the product gets a reputation for having a faulty XXX and people scream about product recalls. Sure, the company isn't going to engineer everything in the camera to last forever -- that makes the product too expensive -- but weakening some specific part to fail will kill both profits and sales.
For digital cameras, there really is no need to build a weak point into the device. The steady advancement of sensors, CPUs, and memory systems all but guarantees that you can make a digital camera that lasts 10-20 years but most users will replace the camera after a few years because the newer model has much better performance and features.
This issue with the iPod is that consumers want the impossible. Consumers love super compact, robust little devices for a low price. Replaceable batteries add bulk, increase the cost, and make the device less robust. A sealed unit is thinner, cheaper, and less likely to be damaged but it is also much harder to repair.
Batteries are an unavoidable weak spot in consumer devices. Worse, LiIon batteries have a really nasty trade-off between battery life per charge and battery lifespan. Charging the battery to a lower voltage can extend the lifespan of the battery from 400 cycles (a couple of years) to over 3,000 cycles (more that a decade of life) but it reduces the usage time per charge by 30%.