Oh come on. By the time the battery is half dead it will be replaced by the latest iPad lest the user be seen with last years model in public. Oh the shame that would bring them.
I still don't get the whole throw-away culture... People seem to think I'm nuts because I don't have the latest everything..
Examples: up until recently I had a ~12 year old ADSL modem running my internet connection. At one point my ISP expressed surprise about this and suggested that I should upgrade it. I have no idea why - a new one would do *exactly the same job* as the old one, which still worked fine(*), so what's to be gained in me spending money to replace it?
(* ok, it was a buggy piece of shit; but since every other consumer grade ADSL modem I've ever seen, including brand new ones, is also a buggy piece shit, an "upgrade" would simply be trading one set of bugs for another set of bugs).
I still have a CRT TV. It works fine, it gives a good picture, it sits in the corner of the room. Various people have said I should replace it with a flatscreen. Why? In the corner position it's in, I would gain no more space, a flatscreen would just have more useless space behind it.
My laptop is now 7 years old. It's got plenty of memory and a CPU that's fast enough to do everything I need it to do... Yet people take the piss out of me having an "old" laptop.
Hell, when my wife lost her iPhone 3GS a few years back, she *wanted* to replace it with another 3GS because she had been completely happy with it and it did everything she wanted. But the 3GS was no longer sold - she would've had to get an iPhone 5 instead. And the only reason I replaced my last phone (HTC Dream) was because it died - the one I replaced it with (Samsung Captivate Glide) may be faster, but the form factor is nowhere near as nice to use and the support is abysmal.
I just don't get the pressure to have the latest gadget - if what you've already got still works and still fulfills your needs then why the hell would anyone replace it? People think I'm weird for repairing stuff that breaks instead of throwing it away and buying a new one...