I've been trying to buy a new laptop and I've settled on the Studio 15 for various reasons - particular its long battery life.  I want this model with a 9-cell battery, and this has always been available in the past - but recently you can only configure it with a 6-cell battery.

Does anyone have any insight as to why this might be?

I've tried calling Dell to find out, or see if it can be configured manually - and the pattern is always the same: the claim is made that getting a 9-cell battery is no problem, but first you just have configure your entire computer.  Of course, this process takes 10-20 minutes over the phone.  Then you ask again about the 9-cell battery and they put you on hold, sometimes for up to 20 minutes.  Eventually they come back and tell you that it is not available, but that should should still buy the system as the battery only makes about a 40 minute difference (actually many reviews and dell's own numbers show this to be closer to 3-4 hours).  Later they claim it is "incompatible with the Core i3/i5 CPU" - how a battery can be incompatible with a CPU is beyond me, and furthermore you were able to configure this in the past, even with core i3/i5 CPUs.

Any ideas?