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SSD-GUY

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Sep 20, 2012
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Hi all

Recently picked up a 2nd hand iPad mini 4. This thing drains battery in use by quite a bit. I'd say 3 mins per 1% of simple Wi-Fi browsing on news websites, nothing heavy like videos etc. All the reviews I've read say that the Mini 4 gets 10 hours of web usage. I'll be lucky to get around 5 hours with that sort of percentage per minute drop.

Furthermore, streaming a simple 720p looped video on youtube, it loses around 25% for 1.5 hours, meaning only 6 hours of usage, whereas the Anandtech review was able to get almost 11 hours of a 720p streamed video.

Is there anything else I should be doing to ensure better battery life? I'm on 50% brightness with Wifi on. One iCloud account, nothing else on there.

Thanks
 
Last edited:
Since it’s second hand, the battery may have been depleted anyway, it might not be iPadOS at all.
 
This happened to me also after iPad is 13. Back feels warm too. Think the processor is working harder draining more battery.
 
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I can get up to 10 hours of screen on time on single charge, but on a low brightness (<25%, night usage). iBooks, Safari, a bit of Youtube, Gmail, Gmaps, Reddit. iOS 12. Imagine it will be worse when I update to 13.

I could get up to 15 hours on same device with same usage and brightness level on iOS 10. Battery life going down with every major update, same as with any Apple product I reckon.
 
Hi all

Recently picked up a 2nd hand iPad mini 4. This thing drains battery in use by quite a bit. I'd say 3 mins per 1% of simple Wi-Fi browsing on news websites, nothing heavy like videos etc. All the reviews I've read say that the Mini 4 gets 10 hours of web usage. I'll be lucky to get around 5 hours with that sort of percentage per minute drop.

Furthermore, streaming a simple 720p looped video on youtube, it loses around 25% for 1.5 hours, meaning only 6 hours of usage, whereas the Anandtech review was able to get almost 11 hours of a 720p streamed video.

Is there anything else I should be doing to ensure better battery life? I'm on 50% brightness with Wifi on. One iCloud account, nothing else on there.

Thanks
Your iPad probably has a bad battery.
 
Thanks all. After I lot of testing, either the iPad mini 4 on iOS 13 simply doesn't have great battery life, or the battery was bad. I sold the iPad mini 4 and put in a bit more cash and bought a used iPad mini 5. Didn't want the extra stress of testing something for around £100 difference. Thanks everyone for your help.
 
Thanks all. After I lot of testing, either the iPad mini 4 on iOS 13 simply doesn't have great battery life, or the battery was bad. I sold the iPad mini 4 and put in a bit more cash and bought a used iPad mini 5. Didn't want the extra stress of testing something for around £100 difference. Thanks everyone for your help.

Makes sense to pick up 5 if the price difference isn’t too big, enjoy your Mini.

Regardless of how degraded the battery was, Mini 4 came with iOS 9. You can’t really expect the battery life to be as good so many software versions later. Mini 5 will be in the same place on iOS 16.
 
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Makes sense to pick up 5 if the price difference isn’t too big, enjoy your Mini.

Regardless of how degraded the battery was, Mini 4 came with iOS 9. You can’t really expect the battery life to be as good so many software versions later. Mini 5 will be in the same place on iOS 16.

Yeah I found a really good used deal on an iPad mini 5, which I admit if I didn't, I would've probably stuck with the Mini 4.

The Mini 4 is still a nippy device, and not as slow as I was expecting (comparing to an iPhone SE), however for future readers of this thread, iOS 13 doesn't do the iPad mini 4's battery any favours, and you'll find it trickle down at 1% every 2 to 3 minutes when browsing the web at 50% brightness.
 
The Mini 4 is still a nippy device, and not as slow as I was expecting (comparing to an iPhone SE), however for future readers of this thread, iOS 13 doesn't do the iPad mini 4's battery any favours, and you'll find it trickle down at 1% every 2 to 3 minutes when browsing the web at 50% brightness.
I'm surprised you found the SE slower than the mini 4. It's the opposite for me. I find the SE snappier than the A8X iPad Air 2.

By any chance, is the SE on reduced performance due to battery? Also, how full is storage?
 
I
Yeah I found a really good used deal on an iPad mini 5, which I admit if I didn't, I would've probably stuck with the Mini 4.

The Mini 4 is still a nippy device, and not as slow as I was expecting (comparing to an iPhone SE), however for future readers of this thread, iOS 13 doesn't do the iPad mini 4's battery any favours, and you'll find it trickle down at 1% every 2 to 3 minutes when browsing the web at 50% brightness.
I’m going to update my Mini 4 to iOS 13 pretty soon, will report back how the battery behaves.
 
I'm surprised you found the SE slower than the mini 4. It's the opposite for me. I find the SE snappier than the A8X iPad Air 2.

By any chance, is the SE on reduced performance due to battery? Also, how full is storage?

Sorry, I meant the iPad mini 4 was slightly slower than my SE.
 
I have extremely high battery drain when my mini 4 is in stand by and i don't even use it, is this normal behavior??
I updated to IOS 13.4.1 just a week ago, before that i stayed with IOS 10.3.* for several years and didn't experience such issues...
 
I have extremely high battery drain when my mini 4 is in stand by and i don't even use it, is this normal behavior??
I updated to IOS 13.4.1 just a week ago, before that i stayed with IOS 10.3.* for several years and didn't experience such issues...

Define high battery usage. Provide some data for us to see. Otherwise we don’t have any reference to go with.
 
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