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I’ve been using my iPad Pro M4 11” for a couple of weeks now. I was really hoping that the battery life would be better than with the M4, but it’s not.

The battery drops just as fast as my M4 while surfing with Safari, using UBlock Origin Lite, scrolling Facebook, and using the built-in Message app. I’ve been doing a slow mix of the above for about 1hr, and the battery has dropped from 95% to 86%. On my iPhone 17 Pro, by contrast, this would have only dropped about 6%.

Anyway, I think the fancy OLED screen just draws a lot of power. I’m in a dark room and the screen is at 25% brightness. This doesn’t bode well at all for daytime usage with the screen at my typical 40% brightness.

The chassis isn’t getting warm at all, but I’m surprised that the new CPU isn’t giving similar battery/efficiency improvements over my M4, similar to the much better battery life I’m getting on my iPhone 17 Pro, compared to my 16 Pro that wasn’t great.

Edited to add: I am seeing the advertised faster charging speeds, even when using lower wattage chargers.
2nd edit: I’m going to turn off Multitasking and switch back to Full Screen apps to see if the battery life and screen on times improve.
Multitasking in windowed mode KILLS the battery. I never got more than 6 hours on my M2 iPad Pro. Now with iOS 26 with most apps full screen and light use of windowed apps/ slide over I get 7-8 on my year old M4 pro. They gotta figure out the battery on these now that they’re pushing windowed mode so much.

I do notice just browsing Apple Music and the podcasts app both kill the battery very fast. Like it’ll drop a percent every couple minutes. At that rate that’s not even 4 hours of battery life. YIKES.
 
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Reporting back that I’m still disappointed in the M5 battery life, even in Full Screen Apps mode.

I really wish Apple would give us the same Adaptive Battery setting that the iPhones have at the very least.
 
Battery life is great. Losing 13% per hour playing Red Dead Redemption at 50% brightness. That's something like 7 and a half hours of gaming, which is fantastic. More than you'd get from the Switch 2!
 
Evidence?

It's been stated on here that several people's new M5 iPad pro batteries have already degraded after the first charge.

I just checked the health status on my 1 and 1/2-year-old battery in my S9 Ultra. And it's still at 100%, despite having over 150 cycles.
 
It's been stated on here that several people's new M5 iPad pro batteries have already degraded after the first charge.

I just checked the health status on my 1 and 1/2-year-old battery in my S9 Ultra. And it's still at 100%, despite having over 150 cycles.

Mine's great - they aren't getting mine back.

Edit: also meant to add that in no way do I believe there is a systemic M5 battery problem.
 
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It's been stated on here that several people's new M5 iPad pro batteries have already degraded after the first charge.

I just checked the health status on my 1 and 1/2-year-old battery in my S9 Ultra. And it's still at 100%, despite having over 150 cycles.

And you believe this? Try checking your battery health professionally and I guarantee you it will not be at 100%.

Your Samsung battery health isn’t accurate.
 
And you believe this? Try checking your battery health professionally and I guarantee you it will not be at 100%.

Your Samsung battery health isn’t accurate.

Actually this method that I found is accurate. It's not through Samsung's app but through a 3rd party app where you pull log records from the device. I did the same and checked my almost 3 year old phone and it gave me 100% as well.
 
Actually this method that I found is accurate. It's not through Samsung's app but through a 3rd party app where you pull log records from the device. I did the same and checked my almost 3 year old phone and it gave me 100% as well.

So you believe that your Samsung tablet and phone have no battery degradation after years of usage? Yeah right. Dream on .

Just goes to show that Apple are more accurate with their battery readings.
 
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I am pretty happy with my iPad Pro 11 M5 battery life. I've owned the M2 iPad Pro 11 and the original M1 iPad Pro 11.

Granted I can't stand multi-tasking or windowed mode. Full screen for me.

The weight of this thing is amazing. Standby is really good when you don't let iPad OS do what it wants to do (I measured 3% standby used after several days with my setup).


Re - the above traffic - it's been a few years since I've owned Samsung tablets but when I did, their battery health dropped like a brick the first year. Apple's batteries are quite amazing imo.
 
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Mine's great - they aren't getting mine back.

Edit: also meant to add that in no way do I believe there is a systemic M5 battery problem.

Im on the phone right now with Apple customer service to see why they shipped these iPads with defective batteries.
 
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I checked in here specifically to see if my experience was unique. It appears it is not. I just received my 512 M5 13” a few days ago. I can literally watch the battery reserve go down. Just in the time to make it to this forum and read 2 pages of responses the battery has plummeted 3% In just a couple of hours use I was down to 40% and that is simply using pages and keynote and books. I have not watched any videos. I can’t imagine what that must do to my battery life. I thinking about returning unless there is hope for a software/firmware update that will improve battery life.
 
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I checked in here specifically to see if my experience was unique. It appears it is not. I just received my 512 M5 13” a few days ago. I can literally watch the battery reserve go down. Just in the time to make it to this forum and read 2 pages of responses the battery has plummeted 3% In just a couple of hours use I was down to 40% and that is simply using pages and keynote and books. I have not watched any videos. I can’t imagine what that must do to my battery life. I thinking about returning unless there is hope for a software/firmware update that will improve battery life.
That is some really horrific battery life. My 11' M5 - I can use that for hours and the worst I've seen it drop is maybe 20% but I was doing HEAVY video/interactive/pencil stuff with it - reindexing gigs of data (it got warm), etc.

IF it was me, try doing this same thing again for a few days in a row and see if it calms down or if it consistently uses 40%.
 
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Re - the above traffic - it's been a few years since I've owned Samsung tablets but when I did, their battery health dropped like a brick the first year. Apple's batteries are quite amazing imo.
This.

And also, battery health depends on a quintillion factors.

The first one is good-old dumb luck. Some people are just luckier than others. But I also think that most people underestimate longevity. My 9.7-inch iPad Pro was at 164 cycles and 91% health after one year. Atrocious, right? Nine years after purchase, 800 cycles and 85%.

Even if it dropped below 80%, give it time and it will not collapse. I’m using everything I have with original batteries and everything is fine. iPads are especially resilient. Batteries are too large.

Also excluding user-accessible data. I have a nearly 13-year-old Bluetooth speaker. Battery life remains like-new. It says 8 hours of playback (with 50% volume) and I tested it with 33% volume and it gave me twelve hours, about eleven years after purchase. How’s health? I can’t know that. I don’t care either. And it is perfect because it has no software update variable, it’s always the same.

I leave software untouched on iOS devices and I’ve never seen a substantial drop in runtime. My experience with inaccessible battery stats (other than manually timing runtime) confirms this. Batteries are resilient if you don’t misuse them.

I’ve used this speaker outdoors. Always avoided direct sunlight. Always made sure it was cool to the touch. If the sunlight angle changed and hit the speaker, I would turn it off as soon as I noticed, let it cool down, and reposition it.

Avoid pointless stress and you have a battery forever.
 
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