I too was surprised by this view when I started at Oculus, where the game controller folks who had come over from Xbox were adamant that players would rather swap in a fresh pair of AAs than plug into a charging cable.

Personally I've never come around to their side of things, although I do recognise the inconvenience of charging cables while you are using a peripheral (Apple Mouse charging port location especially :D )

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mmh0000 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

For me, I'll always choose a device with standard, user-replaceable batteries over a built-in battery.

1) If the device battery is dead, I can swap it out in seconds and be up and running immediately.

2) Built-in batteries fail, and replacing them ranges from difficult to near-impossible and often involves damaging the device's casing to get the built-in battery out.

When I'm spending $100 on a computer mouse, I'd really like it to last longer than the life of the battery and not have to destroy the casing to get to the battery to replace it.

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xp84 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

IMHO Sony nailed this pretty perfectly 30 years ago on devices like the Discman: Have a footprint which can support a number of standard batteri(es), but engineer it so it also accepts and detects a specially-designed NiMH pack. When the special batery is present, allow the battery to be charged anytime external power is provided.

Now you have the best of both worlds: Economical rechargable use for the 90% of the time that the user's in their normal routine, and easily ability to swap temporarily to universally-available alkalines in exceptional situations.

Note: When I had one of these, I just used my own NiMH AAs and jammed a folded-up piece of cardstock against the detection switch, which worked perfectly fine.

	▲	account42 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		IMO just having the battery pack replaceable without tools is what matters more than using a standard one. As long as the device is even remotely popular there will be cheap replacements available.

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xp84 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Regarding #2 the fact that probably the majority of battery-powered non-toy devices now are designed not to ever have their battery serviced is indicative of a (in my opinion) diseased mindset of disposability. Each of the components including battery and other wear parts are only spec'd to last about 12-18 months. We're being conditioned (by one-year warranties and by the lack of repairability) to think that it's normal and expected that you discard and replace everything smaller than a car every 18-36 months, and a car every 7 years or so because "obviously" anything older than these milestones is "obsolete anyway."

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swiftcoder 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah. Though to be fair, the alternative in the controller space in that era was hot-swappable rechargeable battery packs - a ton of 3rd parties provided them for Xbox 360 controllers.

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mitthrowaway2 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I still use my Xbox 360 sometimes, and the only controllers that still work are the ones with AA batteries. The rechargeables have long since died completely.