Consumers have no acess to bid on the incremental value of features. There is no supply side market for these. There is no market because apple is playing monopolist (legal). Lets not use sloppy language !!
They could have kept buying Nokia 3310s instead of iPhones if they thought that a replaceable battery was more important than everything else they got with the Apple product. People made the same argument about physical keyboards, and look at what happened to RIM.
Which comes back to the incremental value of features thing.
what? how does apple have a monopoly?
The larger point is that consumer choice isn't there. You can't get an iOS device with a removable battery. That doesn't prove that current Apple customers don't want a removable battery, it just proves they value some other characteristics more, and the market may not be offering any single product that satisfies their optimal set of preferences.
When that happens it means there is room for a newcomer to disrupt the market. If someone started selling iPhones (or something sufficiently equivalent) with removable batteries, some people would buy them -- if only because it would double the resale value since the phone wouldn't become landfill after the non-replaceable battery goes flat.
Are you going for satire?