iPad 3 battery drain is insane!

[MythicFrost]

I didnt think simple puzzle games would drain it that fast. The only time where the battery seems to have lasted was when in airplane mode. I might also need to check my wifi signal is strong enough. I realise I was downloading infinity blade in the background so this might have squeezed the battery a little but even so. I'd be ok to put up with one hours drop compared to the iPad 2 but not 3-4hrs. I was planning to use it out and about today but right now its powered off and being mains charged up.

You're correct, a simple puzzle game won't cause the GPU or CPU to drain too much power. It's the display.

The iPad 2's display draws 2.7w at 100% brightness, but the iPad 3's display draws 7w. According to DisplayMate.com, the iPad 3 lasts 5.8 hours with the brightness set to 100% while doing nothing. The iPad 2 lasted about 6.4 hours.

I'd say with 50% brightness you should see eight or nine hours of use playing a light game like Angry Birds.

 

[superstrikertwo]

Also it isn't a simple puzzle game. It uses physics for the liquid which can cause a good amount of drain.

 

[Actual Size]

My battery is the same, if not better, than my ipad2.

Mine as well.

Although I had a friend of a friend ask me if my ipad 3 has battery issues. It doesn't. But his certainly does. There are bad ipads out there but they aren't ALL bad.

The people who got bad ipad 3's probably have bad karma. "God" is punishing them for something. You can't blame Apple for your own mistakes.

 

[David Menzel]

I have the same "issues". My iPad loses 10% of its battery power in one night if airplane mode is activated but wifi is turned on.
If deactivate both (usual airplane mode without wifi) my iPad loses only 1%.

What is my iPad doing while I'm sleeping? I hope Apple come up with a software update to fix that issue. I think almost 10% for just standby with wifi is a little bit to much battery drain for just one night.

 

[MRU]

Did you guys with iPad 3 drain set up your new iPads fresh, or restored from a backup of your iPad 2? Others have reported increased battery drain from restored backups which was sorted when the restored from fresh.

I set mine up clean when I read this, and haven't experienced any significant difference between my iPad 3 or 2 battery life, and yep I'm gaming a lot on mine too. In fact I have the 4g version of the new iPad, and had wifi only with iPad 2 and still artery appears the same.

Screen brightness is 65% or so.

 

[David Menzel]

Did you guys with iPad 3 drain set up your new iPads fresh, or restored from a backup of your iPad 2? Others have reported increased battery drain from restored backups which was sorted when the restored from fresh.

I set mine up clean when I read this, and haven't experienced any significant difference between my iPad 3 or 2 battery life, and yep I'm gaming a lot on mine too. In fact I have the 4g version of the new iPad, and had wifi only with iPad 2 and still artery appears the same.

Screen brightness is 65% or so.

Do you think that it a complete restore "as a new iPad" will help to fix the problem and decrease the battery drain?

(Actually, I don't like to install everything again.)

 

[ArztMac]

So my iPad 3 was at 95% charge this morning. I played 'Wheres my water?' for 2 hours and its down to 65%! The brightness was on medium. I cannot get my head around this. From my experience Im looking at 6-7hr battery per day, OK that's about enough but my iPad 2 (let's face it, a totally different machine) gave me ~10hrs for the same usage patterns.

So now im going to keep the iPad 3 screen even dimmer and use airplane mode when i dont need the signal. The fact it takes forever to charge doesnt help.

I really hope Apple improve the power management (seriously down clocking the CPU/GPU etc) with the next iOS update.

The retina is nice but we seem to be paying a hell of a price on the battery life. I was not expecting that.

10h stated battery life is for general rasks such as Mail, Net & Music over WiFi.

If you use 3G/LTE play GPU powered games, expect a 20-30% higher power drain. Common knowledge.

 

[Alvila]

10h stated battery life is for general rasks such as Mail, Net & Music over WiFi.

If you use 3G/LTE play GPU powered games, expect a 20-30% higher power drain. Common knowledge.

Heard, I haven't had any problems with the battery, it always seems everyone looks for the flaws,

 

[Sir Ruben]

Also it isn't a simple puzzle game. It uses physics for the liquid which can cause a good amount of drain.

lol

 

[Stealthipad]

Give it a week and see how it goes.

 

[MRU]

Do you think that it a complete restore "as a new iPad" will help to fix the problem and decrease the battery drain?

(Actually, I don't like to install everything again.)

I don't know if it does or not. But having read other people saying it fixed some of their issues before I got my iPad 3, I decided to set it up fresh from day 1. Haven't had any battery issues.

Is it really that much of a pain ? Could you not do a backup - restore fresh with just some of the apps you use regularly on - see if it improves the battery issue over that day. If it works install everything else, if not - restore from the earlier backup.

 

[David Menzel]

I don't know if it does or not. But having read other people saying it fixed some of their issues before I got my iPad 3, I decided to set it up fresh from day 1. Haven't had any battery issues.

Is it really that much of a pain ? Could you not do a backup - restore fresh with just some of the apps you use regularly on - see if it improves the battery issue over that day. If it works install everything else, if not - restore from the earlier backup.

Mmm yeah you are right but I would like to know if somebody else already tried it. Pain is the wrong word, but installing all apps, videos, newspaper, documents, music via iTunes Match ... simply takes some time. (Call me lazy but I really want to avoid that )

 

[Delorean2006]

So my iPad 3 was at 95% charge this morning. I played 'Wheres my water?' for 2 hours and its down to 65%! The brightness was on medium. I cannot get my head around this. From my experience Im looking at 6-7hr battery per day, OK that's about enough but my iPad 2 (let's face it, a totally different machine) gave me ~10hrs for the same usage patterns.

So now im going to keep the iPad 3 screen even dimmer and use airplane mode when i dont need the signal. The fact it takes forever to charge doesnt help.

I really hope Apple improve the power management (seriously down clocking the CPU/GPU etc) with the next iOS update.

The retina is nice but we seem to be paying a hell of a price on the battery life. I was not expecting that.

I noticed that with all my iOS devices sometimes the percentage indicator will go down quick and ill shut off the device and then turn it back on and then the percentage indicator will be back up, then the battery wouldn't drain as quick and I would never want Apple to down clock anything, i would never want to decrease the performance of anything

 

[roxxette]

Well that ipad def. found hes "water"

 

[Ryox]

Is this normal?:

iPad 3 was at 25%
I plugged it in to the supplied charger and kept using it for web browsing. (youtube, news articles and videos, macrumors, reddit etc.)
Than it completely depleted its battery and turned it self off despite it being plugged in.

 

[MacAttacka]

Well I just wanted to add a little more info to this thread.

So as I mentioned playing WMW? at 50% brightness on the iPad 3 was seeing more 20% per hour battery drain. That would give me just ~5hrs battery life while gaming. My iPad 2 never bled juice that fast. I actually thought my iPad had a fault.

Last night I did a full discharge and recharge from main. I put the screen at 100%, wifi on and it drain from 50% to 0% in about 3hrs.

So today, at lunch I had a 100% charge and I was browsing on the web on 50% brightness on wifi close to the router. 1hr later my charge had dropped to 95%. Thats just 5% per hr and a theoretical 20hr battery life per charge. That's actually unrealistically high.

I think we have 3 possible conclusions
1. The battery indicator is duff - it may be over or under reporting the true charge
2. The retina, especially at full brightness is a battery draining beast
3. The GPU component of the A5x is a battery draining beat, not only for the actual GPU calculations but also when it comes to scaling graphics for those 3 million pixels.

I'd be very intersted to hear from people who game on the new and old iPad. For example Real Racing 2 or infinity Blade 2, if you played this on the iPad, how was battery life? When you play the same game on iPad 3, how does the battery life vary under the same conditions?

Something just doesnt feel right here. Something in IOS is not optimising the battery or the indicator is just wrong.

 

[MythicFrost]

Well I just wanted to add a little more info to this thread.

So as I mentioned playing WMW? at 50% brightness on the iPad 3 was seeing more 20% per hour battery drain. That would give me just ~5hrs battery life while gaming. My iPad 2 never bled juice that fast. I actually thought my iPad had a fault.

Last night I did a full discharge and recharge from main. I put the screen at 100%, wifi on and it drain from 50% to 0% in about 3hrs.

So today, at lunch I had a 100% charge and I was browsing on the web on 50% brightness on wifi close to the router. 1hr later my charge had dropped to 95%. Thats just 5% per hr and a theoretical 20hr battery life per charge. That's actually unrealistically high.

I think we have 3 possible conclusions
1. The battery indicator is duff - it may be over or under reporting the true charge
2. The retina, especially at full brightness is a battery draining beast
3. The GPU component of the A5x is a battery draining beat, not only for the actual GPU calculations but also when it comes to scaling graphics for those 3 million pixels.

I'd be very intersted to hear from people who game on the new and old iPad. For example Real Racing 2 or infinity Blade 2, if you played this on the iPad, how was battery life? When you play the same game on iPad 3, how does the battery life vary under the same conditions?

Something just doesnt feel right here. Something in IOS is not optimising the battery or the indicator is just wrong.

To answer your questions:

2) It is. It drains 7 watts an hour at full brightness. The iPad 2 draws only 2.7.
3) The A5X (CPU+GPU) uses about 3 watts when under full load.

 

[MacAttacka]

To answer your questions:

2) It is. It drains 7 watts an hour at full brightness. The iPad 2 draws only 2.7.
3) The A5X (CPU+GPU) uses about 3 watts when under full load.

I was going to say all of that should be compensated by the bigger battery but I had no idea the retina used 2.5x more power alone so a 0.7x increase in battery would hardly cut it.

 

[Batavian]

The lack of a proper charger is really my only complaint. The battery in the iPad 3 is bigger than the 11" Macbook Air. Yet the charger for the iPad 3 is less than 1/4 the power.

The stated reason for doing this is that the USB cable can't handle any more than a couple of amps. Personally I think the reason Apple did this was either aesthetics or cost savings. I can't think of any other reason.

Put another way...

The iPad 2 is filling a 25 watt-hour "bucket" with a 2 amp USB "hose".

The iPad 3 is filling a 42.5 watt "bucket" with the exactly the same "hose".

All I'm asking for is a bigger "hose" (sounds like a personal problem . Sell it as an accessory. I'd pay $40 for another dongle.

 

[MythicFrost]

I was going to say all of that should be compensated by the bigger battery but I had no idea the retina used 2.5x more power alone so a 0.7x increase in battery would hardly cut it.

Yep. It's crazy, eh -- the iPhone 4's display only draws 0.42 watts. It's still pretty impressive the battery life they managed to keep. Anandtech managed ten hours of continuous video playback (about 2-3 less than iPad 2), at 50% brightness or less I'd bet.

 

[Hello...]

My battery is the same, if not better, than my ipad2.

Mine too!

 

[plucky duck]

Mine drains 1% in 8hrs. For web use at about 50% brightness it appears to drain 5-7% per hour. Perhaps the software reporting battery stats is a bit off? Not sure, but I am happy with what's being reported thus far.

I don't do anything really intensive on my iPad. Playing PPS videos through streaming doesn't even eat up that much more battery, as it's streamed to the TV and the display on the iPad is actually turned off.

 

[Old Smuggler]

Same here

 

[Quantus]

I'd be very interested to hear more battery statistics when gaming.

 

[andrewfee]

Even simple looking apps can drain the battery quickly. SpellTower, my favourite game on iOS, drains the battery far quicker than tasks like web browsing, email, and even watching videos in the YouTube app (note: I use headphones when watching video) despite it being a very simple game. The same thing applied to my iPad 2.

Most apps are fine, but some of the apps I have, which haven't yet been updated for retina, run very slowly and drain the battery quickly as a result.

I actually had about 7 hours of use over the weekend, mostly with the brightness around 40%, and it only drained my battery down to 50%. This was mainly reading the web, checking email, reading RSS (in Reeder and Flipboard) books, articles (via Instapaper) and chatting to people in Messages. I also watched a film streamed from my PC via iTunes in the Videos app, and a few shorter videos on YouTube.

I don't know at which point it changes in favour of the new iPad, but with a 70% larger battery, I can actually see you getting considerably more than 10 hours use from it, if the screen isn't too bright.

Of course at higher brightnesses, especially 100%, it will drain quicker than the iPad 2. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm certainly finding that I don't need the brightness as high on the new iPad as my old one to read the screen comfortably.


All that said, a lingering issue is that iOS 5.1 did not fix all the bugs causing the battery to drain quicker than it should. I use Activity Monitor Touch (because it went free a while back) to measure CPU usage when the iPad is idle and while it usually stays below 5% or so, after several days of uptime, that number gradually increases to 10–15%. (this is better than iOS 5.0 on my iPad 2 where it could go as high as 30%!)

The only fix for this that I have found is to:

1. Turn on Airplane mode
2. Quit all open apps. To do this, double-tap the home button to bring up the app switcher, hold down on an app as if you were to move it into a folder, and then quit them all.
3. Restart the iPad. I would recommend doing this at least twice. Usually 1–2× is enough for idle CPU usage to return to 1% (as it should be when there are no apps open, and no internet access for notifications) but I have seen it take as many as four restarts before it dropped to 1%!

I wish I knew what the cause of this was (or more accurately, I wish Apple knew) because it's very frustrating, and I usually only notice it once the battery has drained to 60–70% in an hour or two, rather than the 2–4 it should take.

It's not simply the iPad being busy doing tasks in the background such as fetching mail, because it happens even with Airplane mode on, and I've left it alone for 20–30 minutes (but left on, rather than sleeping) and it still never settled below 10–15% CPU. I find that this has to be done every 3–4 days.