iPod touch How can I tell if my new iPod Touch has a defective battery?

[Hobbes777]

I recently purchased a brand new sixth generation iPod Touch. I bought it to replace my fifth generation iPod Touch, which I had used heavily for years and had it's battery's capacity heavily degraded to the point of only holding a fraction of it's former charge. It still will play podcasts and music for many many hours between charges, but any kind of app or browsing drains the battery in a matter of minutes.



Anyway, I've had the new 6Gen iPod for a few days and it feels like it's battery drains insanely fast for a new device. I downloaded a program called "iBackupBot" which is supposed to show you a batteries capacity. It said it was good, but I have no idea if it's reliable or not, so I decided to do a test.



I turned on my old 5G iPod Touch and my new 6G, both fully charged, turned on wifi (Because that's how they're usually left in my daily use), and let both play podcasts on my favourite podcast app (Downcast) at moderate volume.



After 16 hours, my degraded old 5G iPod Touch is still going strong, still around a third to a quarter battery. My new 6G though already is already almost completely drained and needed to be charged after around 13-14 hours. I know the new iPod has a much faster processor and only a slightly bigger battery, but Apple says it's still rated for 40 hours of music or eight hours of video. I don't understand how I can't even get it to 20 hours with podcasts.



I bought the new iPod directly from Apple.com, so I know it wasn't sold some repackaged older device. My question is, what is an easy, accurate way to test the battery performance on this iPod Touch 6g? I know I likely don't have long to return it, and I want to be sure I'm doing so for a good reason.

Thanks in advance

 

[rigormortis]

if i backup bot says the battery is normal and gives you a good percentage left, then the genus bar diagnostic will probably report the same exact results

apple defines a bad iPod battery as one that has less then 80 % capacity before 400 cycles

 

[RMo]

I know I likely don't have long to return it...

You have a year*--the battery is covered under the standard one-year limited warranty (unless you have the $60 AppleCare Plus plan that extends it to two years and includes accident protection for a per-incident fee). The warranty and AppleCare cover "batteries that retain less than 80 percent of their original capacity," though it's not clear if you're supposed to measure that with mAh (would make sense except Apple doesn't publicly disclose those specifications) or with use-time compared to Apple's estimates (easy to do but more variable depending on how you're using it).

I noticed my 6th gen battery seemed a lot worse than my 5th gen battery, even after I set the iPod up as "new" and was careful about what apps I installed and what kind of access to notifications/location/etc. I allowed them. Then, as I recently mentioned on another thread in this forum, I had it replaced under warranty for a completely unrelated problem and found that the battery in my replacement was much better. If my original wasn't a dud, then I at least suspect there is wide variance in the battery life and quality in the 6th gen Touch.

*Well, not to "return" per se, but to get it replaced if Apple determines that it is, in fact, defective. What usually happens is you return yours and get a like-new, usually refurbished, replacement.