This was also what the Sony repair staff told my friend(who's wm1am2 battery became bloated), he was told that it is recommended not to continuously burn in the walkman but to provide resting periods.
The reason is because the repair staff said this applies to all modern electronics which are designed with much smaller components and using high power semiconductors, due to these, it can cause regions within the circuit board to heat up which when the heat is not dissipated adequately over time especially if you are running the device continuously or likely with a casing that does not provide good cooling properties, this can cause the internal soldering to fail from prolonged thermal stress over time. Ideally the device should be rested after 8 to 10hours of usage for optimal longevity of the device.
Do note the above is a hearsay from a conversation with my friend, I was not at the scene where the sony repair staff talked to my friend, so there might be some misquotes/miscommunications of the Sony Staff from my post.
How true is the above? I am not sure. But I guess it depends on how much you treasure your device and likely how much heat is your device outputting, more heating likely means lower lifespan.
I worked on telephone Central Office switches, which ran 24 x 7 for years, with a target uptime of 99.99%, so the idea of suggesting to rest equipment for 8-10 hours every day makes no sense to me.
This sounds like some of the made up reasons/excuses I've heard from ignorant or malicious repair people. They are supposed to be knowledgeable, but many of them are not, and they use their position of technical experience and "knowledge" to make unfounded claims. Some do it as a power trip, and some do it knowingly, taking pleasure from spouting nonsense, that everybody treats as superior knowledge.
If equipment needs to be rested for 8-10 hours every day, that makes it pretty useless. I'd expect that kind of advice for the days of when we used horses, instead of cars. Letting a horse rest, I could understand.
A more likely reason is that the DAP was run with an insulating case, put on a non conductive pad, cloth, paper, etc., etc., with no ventilation, and probably overheated and cooked itself. People seldom pay much attention to heat conduction/dissipation, air flow. Just pay attention to the equipment occasionally, to make sure that it is not overheating. Case in point, I believe in using a ventilation fan on my Router which runs 24 x 7. I seldom have a Router failure. Same for HDDs in a PC, that has a front and rear fan pulling air over the HDDs.
There is a real reason for equipment failing more frequently nowadays, due to the fact that most consumer equipment is purposely designed and manufactured to be underpowered, overheated, and under ventilated, so that they will fail faster.
- They do not install spark suppressor capacitors on high current switches anymore, so they will burn out in about 1 1/2 years. This used to be done, and the switches would last for many years.
- A Philips VHS/CDR burner I owned had no ventilation holes or fan, so that it would constantly overheat and shut down.
So If a DAP was extremely poorly engineered, then under normal use, yes, it could fry itself. And I deem continuous usage as "normal", unless there is a warning by the manufacturer against it. But I would not expect this to be true of a WM1xM2 DAP. I would rather believe that a user could be unknowingly causing it to overheat due to bad habits. That is extremely likely. Or it could be a bad component, or battery. Think Samsung S7 phone.
