Since the wifi version will probably have the same new supersize battery as the LTE version, and won't have to power that hungry mobile chip, can we expect hours more battery life out of the wifi iPad?
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iPad 3 Wifi battery life
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Apple says 10 hrs Wi-Fi browsing and 9 hrs LTE browsing...
Not to mention the LTE owners can simply turn off cellular data.
But what are they talking about? Are they talking about the LTE iPad using the LTE connection vs an LTE iPad simply using Wifi? Or are they talking about an LTE iPad using LTE vs a Wifi iPad using Wifi?
I had this exact same question. I realize that the quad core GPU and retina display will use more battery than the iPad 2, but I have to believe that the Wifi only model will be more than an hour difference.
Apple is one of the only companies that doesn't lie to their customers about battery life. Many of their products (4S issues aside) actually outperform what Apple advertises as battery life. I wouldn't be surprised to see the Wifi only model outperform that 10 hour mark, considering how much more massive the battery is.
What's the difference? If the LTE chip is disabled via the Cellular Date radio button in the settings menu, then the LTE model on Wi-Fi would perform to the same extent as the Wi-Fi only. It's only when you enable and start using cellular data, that you would notice a dip in battery life.
And I think that the assumption that somehow the LTE radio sucks a lot more than the WiFi radio is incorrect. It sucks more, but not significantly more since Apple is claiming just one hour difference, and I'd assume their testing procedure was intended to provide a relatively accurate estimate.
Im still throwing in my speculation that the A5X CPU is clocking higher than 1Ghz. I mean is the retina really sucking up that 70% extra juice going practically alone? The CPU is fabbed on a much smaller process than A5 so its got to be much less power hungry than before so there is headroom for higher clocks I'd guess were needed to keep up with the retina and to keep the quad core gpu fed with data
LTE based phones seem to require significantly larger batteries than than 3G phones, and 3G uses more battery life than wifi (the iPhone 4S gets 9 hours browsing on WiFi, and 6 hours browsing on 3G according to Apple).
So basically, the numbers don't really add up. It seems like the battery life gap between WiFi iPad and 4G iPad should be significantly larger than the WiFi iPad and 3G iPad, but instead it has the same gap.
Also, I'm not convinced the retina display needs significantly more power than the non-retina display. There are more pixels, but AFAIK the biggest power draw is the actual backlight, which is the same 9.7" as it has always been. The cpu/video processor would need more power of course, and maybe the backlight is brighter (higher pixel density might also be less transparent?).
There is something inaccurate about apple's numbers, it would be nice if someone (i don't have the right setup) would do an in-depth battery life test.