Razor blades are to razors as BLANK are to fuel cells?

Reports of impending retail sales of fuel cells fill me with hope that we'll all have limitless and cheap power from fuel cells soon. Then maybe the ubiquitous AA battery could one day have an alcohol or water powered equivalent, one that never needs to end up in the trash and therefore eventually rotting in a landfill.

However it starts me thinking - batteries are wonderfully profitable and even rechargeable ones have a pretty limited lifetime that will have you coming back for more within a year or two. For instance laptop batteries seldom retain close to full capacity for more than two or three hundred cycles - maybe a year for a heavy battery user. After that you're down to maybe 50% and even a good 4 hour battery is getting close to the point where you'd consider tossing it and shelling out for a new one. And oh how expensive those batteries are - you're lucky to get even a low capacity lithium-ion battery for under $100, many will top $200! That's a nice little earner for someone, rather like selling razor blades for $1 each or ink cartridges for $50 each.

Okay, the laptop battery maybe not quite as egregious as $1 razor blades - I'm sure the profit margin is nowhere near as high, but batteries are certainly the Achilles heel of a laptop which could otherwise last many many years without an dime spent on new hardware. In fact I have a seven year old P4 800Mhz laptop kicking around that works fine except for the battery - a new one would cost more than the laptop is worth. Part of this is because for whatever reason no two laptop batteries seem to be alike because manufacturers never could agree on a universal AA, AAA, C, D (whatever happened to B batteries?) style standard.

But the cynical might also say that having custom batteries for each laptop not only optimizes space utilization but also gives the manufacturer a) a way to make an extra $50 to $100 on every new battery, and b) by keeping a monopoly on replacement batteries lets them keep prices high and hence encourage people to just buy a new laptop instead of a new battery. After all if a new battery is $200 and a new, faster and better laptop is $400 or $600 then hmmm, maybe I wont bother replacing that battery more than once, if that.

So what I want to know is, if fuel cells come along how are they going to maintain that model? If we can all go to the hardware store and put some isopropyl alcohol that's a buck a quart (or whatever) and keeps our laptop going for a month or several where is the incentive for manufacturers to make fuel cell power units a) cheap, or b) long lasting - both of which will hurt them profit wise. For a long time now fuel cells have been touted as the magic cure for laptops that will give long off-power usability and hence dramatically increase the utility of the little beasts. That in theory should boost laptop sales and encourage everyone to pull out a laptop on a long distance plane flight.

Somehow I think its going to take a third party mass producer of these batteries to achieve that dream because manufactures like Samsung or Toshiba will want to keep fuel cells power docks rediculously expensive by restricting supply to very high end systems. It could be five or ten years before they are even approaching affordability for your average low end laptop user. And airlines will try very very hard to have them outlawed for as long as possible so those deep pocketed business travelers will not want to buy them. As we all know a cup of alcohol is far more dangerous than the first class drinks cabinet full of liquor, and thousands of pounds of aviation fuel. Isn't it funny that airlines never caught on that lithium-ion batteries might potentially be dangerous until they actually started exploding? The fact is that any high density energy storage device has that potential, bet it lithium-ion, fuel cell or shoe bomb. But then when we are still fretting about cell phones causing a plane crash (supposedly) its no wonder there is still disinformation and FUD floating around the airlines business.

Personally I think its time we went low tech and need to get laptop power down far enough that you can power it from a simple foot pedal (like an old fashioned sewing machine) or hand crank. At that point we can all have as much power as we want so long as the airline keeps giving us food and air. Oh, I forgot - they already stopped the free food part and would probably like to charge extra for the air too. I'm sure they could find a way to bang foot power generators too, inspite of the fact they could probably save a few lives by reducing deep vein thrombosis - otherwise known as "economy class syndrome".