[grumbel]

They all degrade and hold less charge over time and eventually fail completely, it will just take years or decades. But with today's forced obsolescence on the software side I tend to agree. The chance that a device becomes useless long before the battery causes issues are pretty high. The only device I ever had the battery fail first was the PSP (user replaceable), and that was after 20 years. Everything else had other hardware fail (buttons, sticks, flash memory) or run out of software updates ages ago.

That said, this will get more important going forward, phone and tablet hardware updates get ever smaller and incremental, and longer software update cycles are another thing the EU is starting to regulate. So devices reaching 10+ might not be that unusual in the future.

And as an aside, the one type of battery that very frequently fail isn't the built-in LiPo, it's the good old user replaceable Alkaline AA and AAA batteries, and they don't just run empty, they leak and destroy your hardware in the process, even long before the expiry date and with charge left. It's so common that I am surprised that that hasn't seen any regulation or consumer protection jump into action. Using NiMH instead helps, as they don't leak.