Actually 4 years for a rechargeable battery is pretty good, especially if you use the device every day. In this industry, 3 to 4 years is the expected life of any of these products which is probably why you typically do not see Extended Warranties available for much more than 3 years. It is pretty well known that after 3 years, batteries start to fail, hard drives have a high likelihood of crashing and the technology is pretty much obsolete. Everything is getting to be disposable. Just 10 years ago, I had 4 printer repair shops within a 20 minute drive of me and they have all gone out of business. The only remaining Printer repair shops specialize in high end Office printers only. Just try to get someone to fix your home inkjet printer?
Apple is probably the worst offender of having a disposable mentality. All of their products are designed around looks and never for ease of repair or the ability to upgrade. Just walk into an Apple store and see if they will upgrade the memory in your iPhone or iPad, or install a larger drive in your MacBook Air? Unfortunately, other manufacturers seem to have decided that if Apple can get away with it, they can too. Don't get me wrong, Apple makes some fabulous products and probably has some of the most durable products out there. Their laptop and iPad batteries far outlast most other manufacturers but they still are not designed to be user replaceable and the bottom line is they want you to purchase the latest, greatest model rather than repair or upgrade the one that you already own.
Personally, it really irritates me that the average user cannot replace the battery in their mega $$$ phone or tablet. You should be able to add Cellular service to your iPad or Table at a later time and when you drop it and break the screen you should be able to snap in a new one with relative ease.
I can only think that at some point, someone or some company will decide to take a different approach and there will be some real competition. I would dump my iPhone in a heartbeat, if someone came out with a comparable phone with a user replaceable battery, upgradable memory and other replaceable parts like the screen. How thin does my phone really need to be? I would give up a few millimeters any day to get a replaceable battery or even a longer battery life.
I can only guess that people will only put up with this for only so long... I am really getting tired of spending a small fortune every year to keep up with the latest technology. I remember, back many years ago, when I would purchase the latest version of every software that I used, every year. In those days, software manufacturers would give you a real nice discount if you were a current user and simply upgrading. And the latest version had many fabulous new features that really made the upgrade seem worthwhile. Over time, I started changing the way that I upgraded and decided that I did not need the latest version every year but could go 2 years before upgrading and then 3 years and now I am pretty much at 4 years between upgrades. How much can you add to a program like Microsoft Word to make it worthwhile to spend another $300 every time a new version of Office comes out? Most people do not use more than about 10% of the features anyway and would be perfectly happy with Word 97 if it would still run on Windows 8 or 10? I guess the new subscription based software concept will change all this? Now we will be paying monthly for the rest of our lives for features and upgrades that we never use or really need.
Intuit has figured it all out, if you use online banking with Quicken it just stops working after 3 years forcing you to purchase the latest version. How would you like that if your Tablet simply turned off after 3 or 4 years? Well, maybe that would be a little drastic? How about just the WiFi automatically stopped working after 3 or 4 years?
Good luck on the Asus Tablet Chris H, I do like and have many of their products and still use one of their earlier Netbooks all the time. It does not hold a charge for as long as it once did but it does have a user replaceable battery.
To prolong the life of the battery. I have read a lot on the subject of rechargeable batteries over the years and batteries are getting better but really have not kept up with the pace of electronics in general. Use, storage, Discharge Cycles, temperature and recharging rate all affect the overall battery life as well as the quality and type of battery that you have. Most Laptops, Cell Phones and Tablets now use Lithium Ion batteries which do not have react the same as the old NiCad batteries of yesteryear where we were always told to exercise the batteries by deep discharging them and recharging them several times per month. Lithium Ion batteries do not need deep cycling and this may actually shorten their life.
Here is a great resource for battery information and what affects the life of Lithium Ion Batteries.
http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries
Dana
Wayland Computer
p.s. Great to have you back Lee
Note: This post was edited by its original author to combine second post with this one here. on 05/08/2015 at 2:53 PM PT