You can read the data of the circuits in laptops. I'm not seeing any circuitry based capacity limiting but can see that if I'm outside in 40 degree weather working on my laptop that the capacity is less than on a hot day. If you run the following commands in linux you can get battery information.

cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info
...or
cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state

You might have to search around a bit as the location for the details could vary with your linux distro.
I watched my Dell laptop batteries as they slowly degraded to about 80% capacity over 9 months or so and then take a quick fall to 50% in another 6 months and then now they sit at 25% the capacity they had before. The BMS in laptop batteries will tell you the voltage of the pack, design capacity, capacity of last full discharge, design capacity warning levels(usually a blinking charge light), depending on the laptop it could show temperature or temperature cutoffs too and the manufacturer of the cells. It's good information that most people don't know their laptops track.

The king of planned obsolescence seems to be Apple, their original iPod batteries lasted about 18 months and the warranty was shorter than that, once the battery died if you called Apple they told you to replace the device and that you couldn't swap the battery. It took a class action lawsuit to get the company to extend their warranty to two years and to have a battery swap program. History repeats itself with the iPhone and current iPod devices. I don't know anyone with a 3 year old iPhone that has a battery worth using anymore and their users seem to replace their phones on a yearly or every other year basis for updates and upgrades that other phone operating systems have already had for years. ...namely simple things like copy/paste and video weren't on the original iPhone.

 

Technology made to be broken
Manufacturers need to take some responsibility for our 'throw away' habits.

By Giles Slade / May 2, 2006

RICHMOND, BRITISH COLUMBIA
My dad bought me a good watch when I was 16. It was a 23-jewel, self-winding Bulova built to last a lifetime. It carried an implicit recognition that I'd grown up - sort of - and that keeping time, meeting deadlines, being where I was supposed to be were all important considerations for the adult I'd become.

Anticipating my oldest son's 16th birthday, I asked him what kind of watch he wanted. But the pleasure of wearing this "badge of maturity" was lost on him.

"Can I have an iPod instead?" he said. I've been considering his request ever since.

iPods have clocks in them. So do cellphones. My son already has a cellphone, so he doesn't really need a watch.

"No watch?" I asked.

"They're old school," he said, meaning out-of-date, out moded, obsolete.

Sensing a trend, I asked, "Do any of your friends wear watches?"

"No," he said. And it's true.

Likewise, nearly 60 percent of American teens have never owned or worn a wristwatch. Wristwatch consumption is in a spiral of decline at a rate slightly exceeding 10 percent a year.

When I realized my son was right, peripheral things suddenly began to make sense. In recent years, I've been confused by attempts to include GPS locaters, cellphones, calculators, PDAs, and even cigarette lighters in wristwatches. Again and again I asked myself, "Does anybody really want this stuff?"

Of course, the answer is, "No."

From the perspective of a declining market, however, these wacky new products reveal watch manufacturers' desperate search for something they can continue to manufacture and sell. The production of any technological device goes hand in hand with the question: "Where is next year's market going to come from?" Repetitive consumption, after all, drives American and global economies.

Take, for example, the iPod my son wants.

Obviously, Apple has come a long way since it accidentally sold GUI (graphical user interface) to Microsoft for peanuts. This time, starting with an ordinary MP3 player, Apple cleverly branded downloadable songs as a way of guaranteeing both the songs' quality and iTune's continuous sales. Meanwhile, they upgrade their player continuously. As often as possible, Apple introduces new, improved, smaller, faster, more powerful models that make their predecessors seem much less desirable. This is what we call "technological obsolescence."

Into this classic marketing strategy, Apple then adds "planned" obsolescence. Lithium batteries sealed inside iPod bodies begin to lose their peak functionality after a year of use. By year two, you can only play your tunes half of the time. This makes the newest model your friend owns so much more attractive. Solution: Toss the old one into the trash and demand the newest iPod for Christmas, Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa. Apple, after all, was the company that originated the expression: "Never trust a computer you can't throw out...."

So, what's good for Apple is good for the economy, and therefore good for America?

No. And the ozone hole over our frenzy of consumption is formidable. Apple has already sold 40 million iPods. They are chemically complex little doodads. Like every electronic device, they are full of poisonous stuff that's truly bad for the environment. (My favorites include lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium, and barium). iPods are also so small that it's expensive to disassemble them and quite easy to toss them into the trash, which then sits in the landfill poisoning our groundwater.

Everything about our culture encourages us to toss broken, useless gizmos into the trash.

In addition to iPods, there are already hundreds of millions of obsolescent cellphones in America. There are also 550 million obsolete PCs and more than 300 million analog TVs that will become obsolete in 2009. The repetitive consumption of these devices is being force-fed by feckless electronics manufacturers who don't yet have a compelling bottom-line reason to stop being so irresponsible.

Maybe it's time we gave them one.

Congress is sitting on four bills that would make electronics manufacturers pay to collect their obsolete toys and disassemble them. As soon as it starts costing these manufacturers money, they'll start making less toxic devices that are much, much more durable.

It can be done.

Think of the Mars Rover and my dad's Bulova.

Not everything we make needs to be made to break.

 

At least Apple batteries have poor security mechanisms that allow you to change everything on the firmware, so you can change the cycle count, manufacture date etc if you want to reenable your warranty or just blow the battery up or something.

 

As a total newcomer to the subject, may I just say that the above posts were VERY enlightening! Great reading, good food for thought.

I admit I've always shared the viewpoint that if "they" really wanted to make "something" better [i.e. more efficient, durable, reliable] they truly could. That being said, I also recall the old adage relating to innovation: "Better to perform, Cheaper to produce, Faster to market. Pick Two".

 

I miss the days when you could fix things when they broke. Not just throw it away and buy a new one. Back in the late 80s and 90s you didn't throw away your computer when it became outdated. You took out the slow obsolete part and replaced it with a good one. Personally, I think there is a market for a more expensive line of products you only need to buy once.