I thought this was interesting in light of the article about Tesla expanding into home batteries. Large energy storage is going to become ubiquitous in the near future, and it will be interesting to see if the batteries will be as maintainable and hackable as they were in 1922. Already we hear of Prius owners rebuilding their battery packs instead of paying Toyota to replace them. In this case, all that was needed was to clean some corroded bus bars: http://imgur.com/gallery/j8Bcp
To some extent, they already are. IMO, one of the most unfortunate side effects of today's tech is the proliferation of incompatible battery packs as a vendor lock-in tactic. Even when the cells inside are a standard design like the ubiquitous 18650, they're almost always in a proprietary pack. Forget about using a Canon battery pack in a Nikon camera, or a Makita pack in a Black & Decker drill.
Don't get me started on the whole "design a non-replaceable battery into that expensive device so we can make it 0.5 mm thinner" nonsense.
Unfortunately, I think the problem is only going to get worse as time goes on.
Erf, sad fact indeed. The cynical me is not even hoping that the Ara project will catch on, somehow the 0.5mm has more public appeal than component reuse (either for planet or their own wallet ecology).
