Quote:
Originally Posted by Ozymango
Kinda along those lines, no matter how good you treat your li-ion battery, they just don't live longer than 2-3 years due to [complex chemistry/physics I don't really understand]. That is, even if you completely baby your battery, and/or if you buy a brand-new battery and leave it on the shelf untouched (well, charge it occasionally but don't really use it) for 3 years, it'll still slowly get weaker and weaker over time, it won't hold a charge. I work tech support and we had a customer who bought a couple of spare batteries for her laptop at the same time she bought her laptop, and she found out the hard way that it's a much better idea to just use one battery as long as possible, then replace it with a new and I mean NEW battery when you need to [she didn't rotate the batteries in her laptop, she just used the same one for a couple years, and thought she'd just use one of the other batteries in a couple years when the first went dead, i.e. she thought she wouldn't need to buy another battery in the next six years]
Basically she ended up with three dead batteries at the same time. And those puppies weren't cheap, so she was a bit put-off. So we try to warn people not to buy a bunch of extra batteries unless they're swapping them out concurrently and just always want to have a spare ready for today.
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This isn't entirely accurate either. If a rechargeable battery refuses to hold a charge then there's likely something else going on besides simply age. I have a 10-year old iPod Classic that can still run for over a dozen-hours on a full charge, which is roughly half of what it held brand new. This is in line with what I would expect from an aging Li-ion battery and is similar to my experiences with other electronics, including older laptop computers.
And since we're talking specifically about ereaders, my 5-year old Kobo Aura does not seem to exhibit any significant reduction in battery capacity and easily lasts weeks between charges.