Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
On media-consumption tablets in general, the hardware remains useful much longer than the OS support. No moving parts, no heavy duty applications; they *should* last as long as LCD displays and TVs, which routinely last a decade or more. The likeliest point of failure on mobile devices are the battery and the power connector.
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I think that is far too optimistic.
For powerful devices like tablets the battery will degrade to the point of being unusable much sooner than that.
Not just that they won't hold power, but that they will generate enough excess heat to cause instability.
I have a NotePro 12.2 tablet, which I've had for about three and a half years.
Battery life has dropped from 10-12 hours to maybe and hour or two if you are lucky.
Once it gets below around 40% it is likely to spontaneously reboot, and it does that a couple of times a day regardless of charge level. It is permanently a bit too hot to be comfortable around the top middle of the screen.
Power socket still works fine, but the headphone socket has stopped detecting whether headphones are plugged in.
If there was an equivalent replacement I would have got one at least a year ago, but there isn't.
I'm still running Android 4.4.2, so I agree with your general point that the hardware remains useful long past any OS updates, but I think the viable timeframe is much shorter than you think.
Battery technology is the limiting factor for most tech.