iPad Air iPad Air 4 standby battery life🔋 experience

[Gandek]

Picked up a Air 4 (2020) coming from a Pro 10.5 over the weekend. One of the main reasons was to just have a iPad around the house for media consumption and the occasional editing and since my Pro 10.5 was down to 85% battery health it no longer served that function well not lasting like a iPad. I could have replaced the battery/get a refurb (since Apple dosent replace the battery in older iPads from what I heard) but in my area stores dont yet function normally so that whole process would have taken a while. I gave it to my brother who will eventually replace it when stores open up more. On to the Air 4 it serves my purposes well and has a ton of upgrades (besides the downgrade to 60hz which I’m getting used to) yesterday I used it a ton and got about 9h30m of SOT with 85% of the battery used (see screenshot) which is in line from what I would expect on a brand new iPad. It also does a great job of handling gaming which I rarely do, but it’s nice to know it can handle them well without losing a ton of % and it doesn’t get hot. Main potential issue for me though has been standby over the past 2 nights I lost an exact 3% with 7-8h of sleep. Screen wasn’t being turned on for notifications and it just drops. I could live with it tbh but it would get annoying if I don’t use my iPad for like 2 days and the battery goes wayyy down. Older iPads always had legendary standby so I’m wondering what your guys experience is, and if it’s normal. Made a poll as well.

Something else to note - when I unboxed it I had to fully charge it from 0% as it was dead out the box. Most likely in storage since late last year so that’s understandable. Also what’s up with Home and Lock Screen taking up so much battery I am not on it that much...

 

[Absrnd]

When you are on your iPad are you able to ..not ..look at your battery percentage, or is it an OCD thing ?
Does it also impede your enjoyment of your iPad, without obsessing with specs of the iPad ?

 

[AutomaticApple]

When you are on your iPad are you able to ..not ..look at your battery percentage, or is it an OCD thing ?
Does it also impede your enjoyment of your iPad, without obsessing with specs of the iPad ?

People want to get as much use out of their devices as possible.

 

[Gandek]

People want to get as much use out of their devices as possible.

Yep that is all especially when it comes to battery life. It’s always the first thing I notice whenever I get a new device + historically it’s always been a great experience with Apple devices - my daily driver iPhone 11 Pro is a battery champ even to this day and I haven’t had any standby drain if it’s just chilling not getting notifications at night.

I have heard elsewhere from an ipad Pro 11 owner that turning off tap to wake helped reduce standby drain so I will try that tonight. With touchid being in the power button anyways I can live with it off. Like I said earlier it’s an iPad... there will be times where I will leave and not use it for days and I don’t want to come back to it being half charged thats the gist of it.

 

[satchmo]

I don’t have specifics numbers, but I feel my iPad Air 4 battery drains faster than my 7th gen iPad.
I don’t know if it’s because I have it connected via smart connector on the Smart Folio keyboard.
I’m not sure if that drains the battery more than the 7th gen iPad which was using a Bluetooth keyboard.

 

[Gandek]

I don’t have specifics numbers, but I feel my iPad Air 4 battery drains faster than my 7th gen iPad.
I don’t know if it’s because I have it connected via smart connector on the Smart Folio keyboard.
I’m not sure if that drains the battery more than the 7th gen iPad which was using a Bluetooth keyboard.

Have you tried disabling tap to wake? So far on average that seems to have saved me 1-2% every night ever since turning it off. iPads with home buttons like the 7th gen won’t have tap to wake in the first place.

 

[Gandek]

Welp in the past few days this thing now drains at about 4-5% when not in use every 9-10 hours EVEN in Airplane Mode with every other feature turned off. This should NOT be happening... I also did a factory reset only installing a few basic apps but still the same thing. Like i said my 11 Pro works totally fine on standby without having to tweak any settings either. There's a lot more reports of this on the Apple forums... Perhaps it sitting on the cold shelfs for a while at Microcenter and coming in dead at 0% screwed some things up hardware wise... They seemed to have got a new stock though of green models recently so I will try and exchange it tomorrow.

Edit: I'm also not ruling out a iPadOS 14.4.2 issue because the 10.5 that I gave to my bro also drains the same way in standby and he also set it up as new. Either way its a pretty disappointing experience when I got my 10.5 in 2017 the battery standby was amazing on iOS 10 and the versions after. I pegged any kind of battery issues on the 10.5 for it simply being degraded at this point but perhaps that was just iPadOS getting worse with battery idle. When I get the new one I'll try to keep it on the stock iPadOS 14.2 it comes with and not update for a while.

 

[Gandek]

Just picked up the new one everything looks good out the box and it came with iPadOS 14.4.1 I will avoid updating it for now. I actually spoke with the Microcenter Apple rep who told me he personally has a iPad Pro 11 (2020) and losing 5% overnight is fairly normal for him while another rep complained about iOS 14 being crap with battery life altogether. We will see how things go, but if standby does become a issue again I’ll just keep this thing and leave it on the charger if I’m away for a while...

 

[Bethanie21]

My Air 4 battery life is great, drops hardly anything when it's sat idle. Tap to wake is always on.

 

[Gandek]

My Air 4 battery life is great, drops hardly anything when it's sat idle. Tap to wake is always on.

So far so good on this one no idle drops at all and survived the night staying at the same % without tweaking any settings either (Kept tap to wake on) already got most of my apps on here too.