Analysis of the new Apple iPad
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 9, 2012 1:37 AM ESTA Much Larger Battery
Apple claimed no decrease in battery life for the new iPad compared to last year's model and only a 1 hour drop over LTE. The problem is that the combination of A5X SoC under GPU load, the LTE baseband and driving/lighting all of those pixels in the Retina Display has a significant impact on power consumption.
Apple addressed the issue by increasing the new iPad's battery capacity by 70%. If the leaked PCB photos are accurate (they look to be), Apple increased battery volume by shrinking the motherboard size and increasing the thickness of the tablet.
The new 42.5Wh battery is downright huge. To put the new iPad's battery in perspective, this is nearly the same battery capacity as the what was shipping in the 2008 13-inch MacBook Pro. This is also a bigger battery than what's used in the 2011 11-inch MacBook Air:
Over the next two years you can expect to see the line between ultraportable and tablet blur considerably. Looking at where the new iPad falls in the chart above really begins to exemplify just how blurry that line is going to become.
With the display off, the new iPad looks and feels a lot like the iPad 2. The additional thickness is hard to see, but the additional weight is definitely noticeable. The new iPad isn't as heavy as the original model, but it's clearly heavier than the iPad 2. I don't believe the added weight is a deal breaker, but it is a step backwards. Maintaining battery life however obviously trumps added weight.
The math is pretty simple. If Apple is claiming 10 hours of battery life with a 42.5Wh battery, the new iPad with the iPad 2's battery would likely be good for just under 6 hours. Such a drop would be unacceptable and thus the new iPad gets a bigger battery and incurs additional weight from the new battery and display components.
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solipsism - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
The reason you typically not state something is because it's not favourable but it's hard to imagine it's lower. After all we are talking about a 70% larger battery with no display or active system resources being used in standby mode.I hope AT or someone tests this but obviously this will take a very long time.
joelypolly - Saturday, March 10, 2012 - link
Might take a few weeks to get the results. Idle standby (radio & wifi off) on the iPhone 4 I had was around 14 days.Death666Angel - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
I'm not Apple fan (own no product and would advise my family and friends to go with other brands 90% of the time). But if I had the spare change for a toy like this, I'd totally buy an iPad 3 over the Android competitors. As it stands now, I don't have the money (need better graphics cards when the 28nm generation is fully launched to support my new 27" display) and so I will wait a few years until such a device can replace my subnotbook. I'll be interested to see if it will be running Android, iOS or Windows. :-)berma001 - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
any chance flash will be viewable on new ipad?vision33r - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
Flash is dead, Adobe already stopped development. You can still use it on Android but they won't do any new releases with new features.WaltFrench - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
hahahahaha.Yeah, for apps that a developer converts to Air.
Adobe announced that they were NOT porting Flash to any new mobile platforms. And it's still Copyright © Adobe, Inc., so even if Apple had an ahem, “change of heart,” they still couldn't.
There are now something like a billion mobile devices that can't view Flash. Smartphone sales outpaced PC sales last year, and with tablets (uhh, iPads) growing explosively into the notebook space, they are likely to outpace PCs in a year or two, also. Windows on ARM ain't gonna support it either.
In other words, websites that rely exclusively on Flash are soon to be unwatchable on the majority of web-accessing devices. The smart ones see that coming. Those that cater to people running Flash games or even (gasp!) work-related videos on their desktop office computers have a bit more time become they, too, watch page views go to zero.
Michiel - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
People who wait for Flash on a tablet, iPad, make me sad somehow.It started as Macromedia Flash about 150 years ago. Back than it was just as bad as it is now.
Hurray for the death of Flash ! Long live HTML-5 and thank you so much Apple for helping Flash out of its misery !
doobydoo - Monday, March 12, 2012 - link
If you're desperate for flash, try Skyfire, iSwifter, or Onlive, all of which offer flash on iPad.flyguy29 - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
more power new form factorxype - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
"It's clear to me that Apple is trying to move the iPad closer to the MacBook Air in its product line, but it's unclear to me whether (or when) we'll see convergence there."Uhm, can you elaborate on that? How is that "clear" in any way? Because both use aluminium and are thin while also sporting a display?
If anything, Apple has been very vocal about their thinking that these are two very different kinds of devices—they even call it PC vs Post-PC. Do you think that’s just marketing? That it’s not actually how they feel about it?
This feels a bit like an argument from someone who would _want_ the devices to all be the same, ultimately converging into a PC-like experience again. I don’t think that’s really going to happen with Apple, at least not in a big way like Microsoft is attempting. Sure, they’ll port some of iOS to OS X and vice versa, but I don’t think they consider merging the two at least for a couple of years, still.
Microsoft is the first doing it (and hats off to them, the Metro UI is a very bold step), but they were the first doing tablets, too, remember?