[Asus  Eee Pad Transformer Prime] firkinator:
I hear your pain, and in fact I RMA'd mine a couple of days ago, as it had become a paperweight, and will take my chances with that. Like you with a "final sale", I ran just past the return limit for Best Buy, which is 14 days rather than 30. I knew there's a reason I don't buy from them. But this was the ipad killer, the new saviour, and after stumbling upon a few suddenly available from their webstore right at Christmas, went for it.

For what it's worth, I have a few thoughts that might help a little that I haven't really seen in here.

This is cutting edge technology, and I knew I was buying cutting edge technology. The word "cutting" is there for a reason, and unfortunately this time the cut is very deep. I don't blame ASUS - the thing worked perfectly on Honeycomb. It would have been nice for them to catch there was a compatibility problem with ICS before putting it out there, but they didn't. I do believe them when they say they don't know what the problem is. Some hardware/software incompatibility issues never get solved. You mention Microsoft, my favorite whipping boy for cutting edge software. Haven't you had things that didn't work, got wrecked, or had other intractable problems with various editions of Windows? I don't even want to count or remember them. I've certainly become a late adopter on MS software, waiting at least for SP1. And not surprisingly, my base systems run Linux.

But the tradeoff here is actually pretty clear. You buy Apple, it works. It has limitations. It's closed down. You'll get upgraded when and if they decide to do so. And if you want to do something outside what they want you to do, forget it. It's like buying a Toyota Camry that has a limiter at 65 mph, and only can travel on 4 lane roads. Safe, but no imagination.

Or you can go the ASUS route, and buy the newly designed sports car that goes very fast, can drive on any road, and supposedly will run on the new nuclear fuel being released next month. Maybe. You know there might be problems, and you know the car is newly designed. The question is, do you buy it anyway?

So I chose the new car. I did some homework, and it seemed ASUS was a company with a pretty good rep, so if I had problems, I had a good chance they'd get resolved somehow. Is it disappointing? Of course. Do I blame ASUS? Not really. I think they rushed this out to market, and I also think the Android folks rushed ICS out there. Stuff gets rushed to market - what a shock. This isn't the only hardware out there with ICS problems, so it's hard to know exactly what the deal is. Gary's comments on the front page seem genuine, and my guess is they're still not sure exactly what the problem is. And they certainly don't want to publish "THE FIX", only to have it not work. That's a real good way to alienate your customers.

So for now I give them the benefit of the doubt. And if they don't completely mess up my RMA, I probably won't change that opinion. I could've waited 6 months to buy this. I'm sure everything will be ironed out long before then, and the tablet will be just as good as I want. But I took the cutting edge choice to get it fresh off the assembly line, knowing full well the risks, and now it hurts. But a lot of people are bitter, and I don't get that. ASUS didn't set out to do this.