iPad Pro Sudden poor battery

[SethBoy]

I have an iPad 10.5" and it is almost three years old, but last week it was still doing great with 7.5 hours of screen-on usage and barely 50% battery usage. From Tuesday, however, I noticed it wasn't lasting that long, and since then I realised it has trouble getting 4 hours of screen-on time with 60% battery usage.

It is getting frustrating since I also got an 11 Pro which barely gets 6 hours of use on one charge while others are reporting 8-9 hours (I've tried Reset All Settings, and even setting up as new). I wonder if they're linked, and so far I've tried signing out iCloud on my iPad and the battery drain seems to persist.

Any ideas how to troubleshoot this?

 

[TheRealAlex]

Yeah, spend a week charging it with a Nintendo Switch Charger or an Apple Fast Charger. The 30 watt or 40 Watt Fast Charger. Pumping extra juice into it will get it calibrated again.
or if you are already using a fast charger use the stock 12watt Charger it came with. Battery may be fatigued from all the extra juice. A slower charge may be called for.
Also disable all background refresh apps. And disable Find my iPad.

lastly go to any Apple store request a battery diagnostic it’s free, and if you have degradation wear level that’s 40% or above That’s past their threshold and will replace it even if its out of warranty just once.

 

[SethBoy]

Yeah, spend a week charging it with a Nintendo Switch Charger or an Apple Fast Charger. The 30 watt or 40 Watt Fast Charger. Pumping extra juice into it will get it calibrated again.
or if you are already using a fast charger use the stock 12watt Charger it came with. Battery may be fatigued from all the extra juice. A slower charge may be called for.
Also disable all background refresh apps. And disable Find my iPad.

lastly go to any Apple store request a battery diagnostic it’s free, and if you have degradation wear level that’s 40% or above That’s past their threshold and will replace it even if its out of warranty just once.

I tried calibrating by draining it to 0 and charging it up again but the battery is still bad. I never heard of using a higher wattage charger to calibrate batteries before.

My question would be can batteries degenerate seemingly overnight? It was still find last week with easily 8 to 10 hours of use on a charge, and now it's down to barely 6 hours.

 

[AutomaticApple]

Yeah, spend a week charging it with a Nintendo Switch Charger or an Apple Fast Charger. The 30 watt or 40 Watt Fast Charger. Pumping extra juice into it will get it calibrated again.
or if you are already using a fast charger use the stock 12watt Charger it came with. Battery may be fatigued from all the extra juice. A slower charge may be called for.
Also disable all background refresh apps. And disable Find my iPad.

lastly go to any Apple store request a battery diagnostic it’s free, and if you have degradation wear level that’s 40% or above That’s past their threshold and will replace it even if its out of warranty just once.

What if the OP doesn’t have a Nintendo Switch charger or an Apple Fast Charger?

 

[TheRealAlex]

What if the OP doesn’t have a Nintendo Switch charger or an Apple Fast Charger?

Drain battery to 20% Go to an Apple store hang out and borrow one.
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I tried calibrating by draining it to 0 and charging it up again but the battery is still bad. I never heard of using a higher wattage charger to calibrate batteries before.

My question would be can batteries degenerate seemingly overnight? It was still find last week with easily 8 to 10 hours of use on a charge, and now it's down to barely 6 hours.

Lithium ion or polymer will chemically degrade overtime period even under the best care. One of if not the absolute worst thing to do to an iPad or iPhone battery is to run it down to 0% that throws off the chemistry
even Tesla’s have a protection system where 0% actually has a 10% Emergency Reserve which can only be accessed if you Agree to 3 Warning Screens saying it will cause irreparable damage if you continue.

 

[SethBoy]

Does it degrade overnight though? I cannot believe that last week I was going 8-10 hours on a charge and now it has become 5 hours. Shouldn't it be more gradual?

 

[mw360]

Have you turned up the screen brightness, or started using it in a brighter environment? Has your access to WiFi or mobile signals changed? You haven’t mentioned that you’ve started using OneNote a lot more intensively. Could that not be the explanation? Some apps use more power than others.

 

[960design]

One Note and Facebook are notoriously high battery killers.

 

[SethBoy]

Have you turned up the screen brightness, or started using it in a brighter environment? Has your access to WiFi or mobile signals changed? You haven’t mentioned that you’ve started using OneNote a lot more intensively. Could that not be the explanation? Some apps use more power than others.

One Note and Facebook are notoriously high battery killers.

I've always used OneNote extensively and Facebook quite often without any issues. In fact, if you look at my first screenshot, I used OneNote a lot that day and the battery usage was only 50% with 6-7 hours of active use. My screen brightness is always somewhere at 25%.

My usage patterns have been very similar which is why I find the battery drop so jarring; it simply didn't last as long between charges even though I was using it similarly compared to last week.
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Last Monday's usage - almost six hours of usage (almost 4 from OneNote) and 60% of battery used. Pretty normal.



Last Tuesday the battery life dropped off a cliff for some reason. Didn't think much about it since I thought I was using it more than usual.


Last Wednesday: back to normal, roughly 40% for 4 hours of usage.

Last Thursday: battery just became poor again and never recovered. Has been barely 5 to 6 hours on a full charge.

Brightness is always 25% at most because I’m usually indoors and I don't like bright screens. As I finished typing this, my battery is now 79%. The first screenshot was taken 9 minutes ago. That's barely 3 minutes of usage per % doing lightweight non-gaming tasks.

The worst thing is that this is also happening to my relatively new iPhone 11 Pro which has never gotten past 5.5 hours of screen usage on a single charge since I got it even though my friends and most people posting their battery stats are getting 8-9 hours. Apple genius has said there’s nothing wrong hardware wise with my iPhone, and despite restoring as new the iPhone still experiences subpar battery life, and now my iPad is affected as well.

I’m suspecting it's an iCloud thing, but the battery still drains on my iPad when iCloud is turned off.

I’m going to try restoring my iPad as new, and not sign in my iCloud at all to see if that fixes the issue. In the meanwhile I’m really hoping someone with similar frustrations could shed light on whether they managed to fix this.

 

[Digitalguy]

That does indeed happen. Lithium batteries don't have a linear life. They will degrade very little at first and will degrade faster after a certain level and then even faster after another level etc. That level will be reached faster in case of numerous deep discharges that can severely impact cells. Having said that the draining might just be a software issue. Have you checked either coconut battery (mac) or imazing (also on windows) for battery health?

 

[Isamilis]

I think, it's better to meet Apple store to check the battery. Agree, it's uncommon to have battery life drop in just one night.

 

[hotr32]

After reading all the many threads of battery drain, do we just have to accept the fact that the batteries are just horrid? I recently purchased a used iPad Pro, last night I checked the battery on coconut and it display 89% health, I went to bed with 64%, 8 hours later, it’s at 18%. The only thing that was alarming was Siri is using 68% battery?
I’m really concerned, and at a loss of how the battery life is this terrible.

 

[Coolpher]

I think after reading all of this no one has asked was there a software update on iPadOS And are you running current software or are you jumping in and out of beta and have you installed any new software recently or updates to that software or any other that can also cause a battery leak if it’s a software install or update it does happen

 

[hotr32]

I am running iOS 13.3.1, I did an iCloud restore when I set it up. No beta’s, and no new software, it’s really confusing it’s this bad.

 

[rui no onna]

After reading all the many threads of battery drain, do we just have to accept the fact that the batteries are just horrid? I recently purchased a used iPad Pro, last night I checked the battery on coconut and it display 89% health, I went to bed with 64%, 8 hours later, it’s at 18%. The only thing that was alarming was Siri is using 68% battery?
I’m really concerned, and at a loss of how the battery life is this terrible.

In your case, Siri's probably just doing the search indexing thing. If you have iCloud Photos enabled, then your photos are likely getting scanned for facial recognition as well.

I'd just leave the iPad charging overnight until setup if fully complete.

 

[AutomaticApple]

In your case, Siri's probably just doing the search indexing thing.

Isn't Bing doing the search indexing for Siri?

 

[hotr32]

So I turned Siri off, I fully charged the iPad, I let it sit for 4 hours......it discharged 6%.......is Siri really my culprit?

 

[rui no onna]

Isn't Bing doing the search indexing for Siri?

That's for web. I'm talking about scanning and indexing of local app data.
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So I turned Siri off, I fully charged the iPad, I let it sit for 4 hours......it discharged 6%.......is Siri really my culprit?

As mentioned, it could still be doing other background stuff (particularly if you have a large photo library). Just give it a few days to settle down for now.

 

[AutomaticApple]

That's for web. I'm talking about scanning and indexing of local app data.

Oh, my bad...