and the battery should definitely last 18 months.

third party companies can replace it for less.  compare that to the
price of a new battery for a typical cellphone.  people end up getting
a new phone instead of replacing the battery.

then you have alignment issues.  a single connector solves all that,
and besides, the dock connecter was designed long before they thought
of the iphone or had any idea how successful the ipod was going to be.
it appeared just 18 months after the first ipod shipped.

they are now
<http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE55S1XZ20090629>

from that article, the chip they use requires it, and presumably that
chip is in other devices too.

Duh.  Brain damage.  I fired up USBView.exe (Microsoft USB Viewer) and
found that the rated current consumption of my iPod Touch is 500ma
maximum.  The cheapo China power supply will only source 330ma.  
Oops.  Time to find a bigger USB power supply.

The majority of iPhones only last one year, because fanboys have to
replace their toys with the latest model each year.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.

Only because the EU is threatening to make it mandatory on all phones sold
there.

While I certainly welcome standard connectors, I prefer it to be by
marketplace consensus rather than governmental decree.  Apple has very good
reasons to use the iPod dock connector on the iPhone (and if/when they add
micro-USB it'll be in addition to, rather than instead of.)

3G chips were available at that time.

You've done exactly that.

I respectfully disagree.

they could have made it with a different radio but for whatever reason,
they didn't.  the verizon rumour is just that, a rumour.  anyone who
was at the meetings won't talk about what went on and everyone else is
guessing.  they probably decided on gsm early on.

they probably looked at cdma too, but that's not what made it out the
door.  not everything does make it out the door.

I don't think there is anything to apologize for.  Since only Apple
would know what Apple was thinking at the time, and no on from Apple
has spilled those beans, all anyone can do is guess.

My guess would be no, however, for a couple of reasons.  First, the
radio chipsets in phones now do a whole lot more than just "radio", and
if you include useful functionality in a hardware-limited platform
it tends to get used because it is there for free.  Since different
manufacturers implement different "extra" functionality in different
ways this means that there can be a significant cost involved if you
need to change to a different manufacturer's products.  Because vendor
lock-in is hard to avoid I think that if Apple thought they would be
doing a CDMA model at any point in the forseeable future they would have
simply picked a radio vendor with a product line which includes CDMA,
along with GSM, products (like TI or Qualcomm) at the outset.  That
they instead picked Infineon, which has no CDMA products and shows no
interest in CDMA, as their radio chipset vendor, suggests to me that
CDMA was never a priority (Infineon's advantage, that their 2G
implementation is quite power-efficient, doesn't strike me as important
enough to change this consideration, especially since 2G is only
a sideline on current phones and Infineon's 3G isn't much better than
anyone else's).

Second, Apple is kind of unique among phone manufacturers in that,
so far, they've only manufactured one model of phone at a time with
only very minor variations, a memory stuff option and 2 case colors
(well, they're now selling two models, but only by retaining one of
last year's variations; I wouldn't be surprised if they cut that out
once they've used up the parts on hand, though).  I believe that the
purchasing and manufacturing efficiency they get by building just one
thing is a contributor to the fact that Apple gets rather stellar
margins from the iPhone at the same time RIM has been complaining
about the effect the competition has had on their margins, and a
manufacturing powerhouse like Nokia has explicitly declined to
compete with Apple on price.  I hence think that building just one
thing is probably a conscious strategy, but if this is the strategy
then they couldn't have built a CDMA thing; over 50% of Apple's iPhone
sales in the most recent quarter were outside the USA and Canada,
and most of that business couldn't have been done if the one thing
was a CDMA phone.  If you want to manufacture just one phone and
sell it everywhere it needs to be GSM/UMTS.

Finally, there have been lots of published guesses about what Apple
thought early on, but the most compelling one to me has been what
Verizon's CEO told the WSJ, quoted here

   http://www.fiercebroadbandwireless.com/story/verizon-iphone-and-lte-good-match/2
009-04-17

and, in particular,

   He said Apple never seriously considered making a CDMA version of
   the phone because of its limited global reach as compared with GSM.

Note that you'll find different people from Verizon spinning this
differently, and I wouldn't necessarily expect people at Verizon
to know exactly what Apple was thinking in any event, but the above
quote shows enough self-disinterest for me to believe it is honestly
what he thinks, and he is in a position to know as much as anyone
else at Verizon (and it matches my own biases!).

In any case, my guess would be that Apple never considered doing
a CDMA phone, but that's only a guess and not necessarily better
than anyone else's guess.  Only Apple knows for sure.

Dennis Ferguson

it's actually very small.  i know of *nobody* who carries a second cell
phone battery, let alone owns a second cell phone battery.  battery
life, particularly on non-smartphones lasts *days* in typical use.

after a couple years, they replace the phone, often for less than what
a second battery costs.  the last time i had a second cell phone
battery was 15 years ago with analog phones and today i get more talk
time than i did standby back then.

as for laptops, npd says less than 5% buy a second battery:
<http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090624/new-mac-laptops-use-batteries-seal
ed-for-power/>

 Hardly anybody buys extra batteries. Research firm NPD estimates that
 fewer than 5% of consumers buy a spare. So, a small trend has begun
 in the industry: More electronic products are being designed with
 their rechargeable batteries sealed inside. For instance, Dell¹s
 (DELL) new high-end laptop, the Adamo, has a sealed battery, as does
 the excellent Flip pocket video camera.

so why aren't people slamming dell or flip?  picking on just apple is
'yet another excuse'.

except that the dock does more than just audio and video and the docks
are much simpler because the output is analog.