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iPad Pro Battery on iPad 13 m4 seems to drain quickly

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apaschea1819

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 23, 2023
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My battery seems to always drain pretty fast. Everytime I’m done with it it comes down to 60%. That is inside, screen at maybe 30% or so. Doing basic things.

This time i was outside and the display was at full. So could be that. but I barely used it. I quickly jumped on Facebook market place to check for something. Then wrote an email and marked up a photo for a countertop. By the time i was done, the battery was at 50%. See screenshots.

Anybody experiencing anything similar. use to have 11 inch before this. Battery would hold up very well.
 

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apaschea1819 said:
My battery seems to always drain pretty fast. Everytime I’m done with it it comes down to 60%. That is inside, screen at maybe 30% or so. Doing basic things.

This time i was outside and the display was at full. So could be that. but I barely used it. I quickly jumped on Facebook market place to check for something. Then wrote an email and marked up a photo for a countertop. By the time i was done, the battery was at 50%. See screenshots.

Anybody experiencing anything similar. use to have 11 inch before this. Battery would hold up very well.
Click to expand...
Mine is dying pretty fast too. I have a 13" M4 Cellular version and we just went for a long drive to the beach (3 hours) but it was just sitting in my backpack not being used. When I got to the hotel and checked on it this morning the battery was at 54%. I charged it the night before we left and not used it since. I am guessing it kept searching for signal and didn't actually go into a deep sleep. I miss the days of old MacBooks that would last 30 days in sleep mode. Not since pre-2016 has one Mac or iOS/iPadOS made it close to that long in just rest or sleep/unused state. I guess that is the give take of "Find My" and always on?
 
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21Southwick said:
Mine is dying pretty fast too. I have a 13" M4 Cellular version and we just went for a long drive to the beach (3 hours) but it was just sitting in my backpack not being used. When I got to the hotel and checked on it this morning the battery was at 54%. I charged it the night before we left and not used it since. I am guessing it kept searching for signal and didn't actually go into a deep sleep. I miss the days of old MacBooks that would last 30 days in sleep mode. Not since pre-2016 has one Mac or iOS/iPadOS made it close to that long in just rest or sleep/unused state. I guess that is the give take of "Find My" and always on?
Click to expand...

Cellular really does stay on, it doesn't go to any kind of deep sleep. It's like your phone. Especially if it's in a place with bad signal (or inside a hotel safe) it will drain really fast.
 
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I've seen the opposite. I wanted to drain the battery to 60 percent to test the new 80 percent charge feature, and it took 4 hours of playing back videos to get it to 65 percent.
 
Rafterman said:
I've seen the opposite. I wanted to drain the battery to 60 percent to test the new 80 percent charge feature, and it took 4 hours of playing back videos to get it to 65 percent.
Click to expand...
when I was home watching Netflix it died a bit faster than expected. Did you do a fresh install or did you bring down a backup? I think indexing eats up battery the first week or two as well.
 
I restored from a backup of a 2020 M1 and the M4 was chewing up ~5% per hour while the screen was off, I wiped it and set it up as new and that drain went away and hasn’t been back. Maybe I was just impatient with the indexing but I only restored <50 GB of data so doesn’t seem like it should have still been indexing after 5 days…
 
My 13” M4 has actually been impressive battery-wise; I expected it to drain faster based what I’d read of the previous 12.9 iPad experiences but it has been great and getting better. I would say that so far, with my usage, I have been on-track for 12-14 hour SoT the past few days.

I have a cellular model for reference.

I do tend to keep my brightness on the low side; I am more than comfortable with my screen pretty dark, and I use 100% dark mode on everything because it’s easier on my eyes. I use Microsoft 365 apps during the day a lot (Outlook, Teams, Office, and OneNote). I also use reddit (Narwhal) and Safari a lot during the day, and a little YouTube at lunch or if I’m doing a lot of writing and need background noise.

I use Apple TV, Netflix, and other streaming apps a lot when I’m at home at the end of the day, along with (again) Narwhal and Safari. I don’t play games much on my iPad.

21Southwick said:
Mine is dying pretty fast too. I have a 13" M4 Cellular version and we just went for a long drive to the beach (3 hours) but it was just sitting in my backpack not being used. When I got to the hotel and checked on it this morning the battery was at 54%. I charged it the night before we left and not used it since. I am guessing it kept searching for signal and didn't actually go into a deep sleep. I miss the days of old MacBooks that would last 30 days in sleep mode. Not since pre-2016 has one Mac or iOS/iPadOS made it close to that long in just rest or sleep/unused state. I guess that is the give take of "Find My" and always on?
Click to expand...
I have had a cellular iPad for years and never seen this before. When I close the cover it‘s very power efficient. It will still drain, but it shouldn’t drain 46% from full like that. Something else was going on.
 
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It does seem pretty excessive… maybe set up a test where you leave it playing for video for a few hours at say 50% brightness from 100%, and make sure it gives a projected 10+ hours? Then I guess you can rule out any sort of hardware issue. If it’s still excessive a week after purchasing then maybe try a fresh install
 
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ZombiePete said:
My 13” M4 has actually been impressive battery-wise; I expected it to drain faster based what I’d read of the previous 12.9 iPad experiences but it has been great and getting better. I would say that so far, with my usage, I have been on-track for 12-14 hour SoT the past few days.

I have a cellular model for reference.

I do tend to keep my brightness on the low side; I am more than comfortable with my screen pretty dark, and I use 100% dark mode on everything because it’s easier on my eyes. I use Microsoft 365 apps during the day a lot (Outlook, Teams, Office, and OneNote). I also use reddit (Narwhal) and Safari a lot during the day, and a little YouTube at lunch or if I’m doing a lot of writing and need background noise.

I use Apple TV, Netflix, and other streaming apps a lot when I’m at home at the end of the day, along with (again) Narwhal and Safari. I don’t play games much on my iPad.


I have had a cellular iPad for years and never seen this before. When I close the cover it‘s very power efficient. It will still drain, but it shouldn’t drain 46% from full like that. Something else was going on.
Click to expand...
This is what confuses me. iPad battery life is very dependent on usage (just like iPhones). I’m a light user who prefers brightness on the low-end as well, and my 9.7-inch iPad Pro got me about 14 hours of SOT on iOS 9. Reviews have seemingly claimed that the battery life of M4 iPads is ridiculously good, but I haven’t seen user reports confirming this. That’s good, but it’s not better than my Air 5 on iPadOS 15, for example.
 
FeliApple said:
This is what confuses me. iPad battery life is very dependent on usage (just like iPhones). I’m a light user who prefers brightness on the low-end as well, and my 9.7-inch iPad Pro got me about 14 hours of SOT on iOS 9. Reviews have seemingly claimed that the battery life of M4 iPads is ridiculously good, but I haven’t seen user reports confirming this. That’s good, but it’s not better than my Air 5 on iPadOS 15, for example.
Click to expand...
Yeah; that was probably too conservative an estimate. Here’s my SoT since I unboxed my 13:

Screenshot 2024-05-21 at 5.11.55 PM.jpeg.png
 
Mine works good. I can get over 10 hours of use browising and watching YouTube e in the background.
 

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Make a force restart. I had the same issue with ipadOS 17.5 on a 2018 Ipad Pro 12.9. This thing was running hot on web browsing only.
Force restart helps.
 
Indexing might make sense to me. Downloading backlog of photos. But seems as if that is all done now. Last night it did the same thing. Drained down to around 31%. I believe I was around 60%. You can see I didn’t do anything. Again, had an 11” celllular as well and this didn’t seem to be happening.
 

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Well same. Paid A LOT for a 1TB 13" iPad Pro...and the first few days maybe weeks were ok-ish. But now, at 35 cycles in, the battery goes down kinda like crazy. Idk. I've had my 2017 iPad Pro 12.9", which had the battery absolutely done for, and yea...that was understandable to last only like 1-2hrs when doing something. But this €3000 new iPad....come on.....and nothing is using battery in the background, I checked lol. Meh. I might try updating to iPadOS 17.7...I'm currently on 17.6.1.
 
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