Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

iPad mini Is the A7 processor really capable of such battery life increases?

J

jcborden

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 20, 2012
126
47
So the iPad mini currently has a 23.4 w/h battery and provides 10+hours of usage. The iPad mini with retina display has a 23.8 w/h battery but drives four times the pixels. Is the pixel count really offset by just the newer more efficient A7 processor or are we likely to find that those battery life claims come up a bit short.

I am just thinking back to the change between the iPad 2 and change to 3 with retina display that required a load more battery to provide the same run time.
 
I might be mistaken, but doesn't the current iPad Mini have a 16.3 Wh battery?
 
jcborden said:
So the iPad mini currently has a 23.4 w/h battery and provides 10+hours of usage. The iPad mini with retina display has a 23.8 w/h battery but drives four times the pixels. Is the pixel count really offset by just the newer more efficient A7 processor or are we likely to find that those battery life claims come up a bit short.

I am just thinking back to the change between the iPad 2 and change to 3 with retina display that required a load more battery to provide the same run time.
Click to expand...

It's an odd one this and the honest answer is we won't know for sure until the reviews and teardowns come out but why would you doubt Apple on this? Battery life is one of their key selling points and they know full well that coming up significantly short would be all over the net and mainstream news in two seconds flat. They're not going to take that chance.

From a technical point of view I absolutely believe that it's possible. For a kick off the current Retina iPad's have a dual light bar system and it's strongly rumoured that the mini version would only have the one. That's a huge power saving right off the bat. We also don't know what (if any) tech changes there have been to that screen to help save power. Finally there have been power savings in the GPU and in the overall chip design being on a 28nm process. Add everything together and you should get a significantly lower power requirement than current generation iPad's.
 
The screen uses way more battery than the proc. Apple is probably using new screen technology in the mini.
 
Marrakas said:
I might be mistaken, but doesn't the current iPad Mini have a 16.3 Wh battery?
Click to expand...
The original $329 iPad Mini does come with 16.3 Whr battery. If you check the specs for the $299 iPad Mini though, it'll show 23.4 Whr. I'm actually quite curious whether the Space Gray and Silver Minis will now have even longer battery life. :)

zbarvian said:
Yes, not sure where the OP pulled that bit of info.
Click to expand...
Apple website. :p
 
The main thing that sucks power is the backlight. The iPad3 & 4 used a dual-LED backlight system which used a lot more power and thus required bigger batteries and a larger enclosure.

There was speculation a while back that Apple might move back to a single-LED backlight system which would obviously have major power saving benefits. Whether this is indeed the case with the Air and rMini we'll have to see but it wouldn't surprise me. The Air's battery is significantly smaller than the 3 or 4 yet they're quoting the same battery life stats so something's been changed.
 
I'm not a super heavy iPad mini user but I do use it often, esp at home at night watching TV and playing angry birds.

I can say that I recharge it once every 2 or 3 days. This is an ATT version.

I think 10 hours is a fairly conservative spec for battery life that Apple has published.

I haven't really had the opportunity to do extended time testing with cellular.

If there is a wash in battery performance between the Mini and Mini w/Retina that would be ok with me.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back