Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Precisely. The battery on a 10-year-old Kindle is going to be completely dead. The life-span of a lithium battery is a clock that starts ticking as soon as the battery is first charged, and nothing can stop it. The average lifetime of a battery is around 5 years.
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I bought 9 Sandisk MP3 players with l-ion batteries and I just looked at my orders on Amazon and found the last one I purchased was in 2008. The newest one, then, is 7 years old. Just guessing I'd say the oldest one is 4 years older than that. I gave 3 away years ago so I still have 6 of them and all their batteries are just fine. None has gone bad. I can't promise they'll hold a charge as long as they used to but they aren't noticeably degraded.
I think what happens is that they're probably going to last 5 years and after that it depends on how you treat them and how much you use them. These are all still used to loan audiobooks to my neighbors but they don't get used that often anymore. Probably each gets used a few hours a month.
How they're treated has a lot to do with how long they last, I think. About 3 years ago I decided to replace my AA and AAA rechargeable NiMh batteries that I use for a number of even older devices. Just guessing, the old batteries were probably 6 or 7 years old and all still held a charge just fine. I gave them to a neighbor along with an old charger I had. Within 3 months all the batteries had gone bad. Since the packages of batteries I bought had more than I needed I gave her a few of my new batteries. Three months later they were all used up. The rest of those batteries are still being used by me for the past 3 years and they all still hold a charge just fine.
I think the thing about batteries is that anything you say about how long they last might or might not be true. I suspect there's no real way around that.
Barry