Asus swears that it has totally fixed the ROG Ally’s battery life
By Monica Chin, a senior reviewer covering laptops and other gadgets. Monica was a writer for Tom's Guide and Business Insider before joining The Verge in 2020.
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When Asus seeded the first units of its handheld ROG Ally gaming PC to reviewers back in May, it’s fair to say that the results were… not overwhelmingly positive. Some reviewers loved the product, while others were broadly unhappy. But across the gamut, there was one thing that pretty much everyone agreed on: the battery life sucked.
The Verge’s Sean Hollister saw a maximum of four hours from the device, whereas his ceiling on the competing Steam Deck (which has a battery of the same size) is closer to seven.
The criticisms rippled through the online sphere. Preorders were canceled left and right — around 10 percent of original buyers, by Asus global marketing director Galip Fu’s recollection, backed out soon after the initial wave of reviews.
“We think that’s okay,” Fu says. “We know that we need to focus on the critical items that we need to fix.”
“We know that we need to focus on the critical items that we need to fix.”
Following the first wave of reviews, Fu and his team held “some very serious meetings.” “We really spent a good amount of time looking into the issue and trying to figure out the solution,” Fu recalls.
The issue, the team eventually determined, was misplaced priorities. Asus had spent too much time and energy on fine-tuning the Ally’s performance in 50W and 30W scenarios (an area where it did, in our testing, outperform the Steam Deck) at the expense of optimizing power consumption at lower wattages. The latter, it turned out, was something that
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