The iPad Air Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 29, 2013 9:00 PM ESTBattery Life
With the iPad Air Apple moved to a 32.4Wh battery, a significant decrease from the 42.5Wh unit in the 3rd and 4th generation iPads. The smaller battery doesn’t come with a change to Apple’s claim of 10 hours of battery life, which implies a reduction in overall platform power. I confirmed a substantial reduction in platform power in my crude measurements earlier in the article. Although it’s possible for the iPad Air to draw substantially more power than the iPad 4, our earlier power data seems to imply that it’s unlikely given the same exact workload. Our battery life tests agree.
We'll start with our 2013 smartphone/tablet web browsing battery life test. As always all displays are calibrated to 200 nits. The workload itself is hidden from OEMs to avoid any intentional gaming, but I've described it at a high level here.
Our web browsing workload came in at exactly 10 hours of continuous usage - an improvement compared to the iPad 4. Battery life on LTE was good as well, consistently delivering just under 10 hours of usage. The fact that both LTE and WiFi tests deliver similar results tells me that we may be bottlenecked by some other component in the system (perhaps display?).
I've been running the same video playback test for a while now, although we're quickly approaching a point where I'll need to move to a higher bitrate 1080p test. Here I'm playing a 4Mbps H.264 High Profile 720p rip I made of the Harry Potter 8 Blu-ray. The full movie plays through and is looped until the battery dies. Once again, the displays are calibrated to 200 nits:
Video playback battery life also improves slightly compared to the iPad 4. Apple’s battery life claims aren’t usually based around video playback, so exceeding their 10 hour suggestion here shouldn’t come as a shock. Apple’s video decode power has always been extremely low.
Our final cross-platform battery life test is based on Kishonti's Egypt HD test. Here we have a loop of the Egypt HD benchmark, capped to 30 fps, running on all of the devices with their screens calibrated to 200 nits.
Our 3D battery life rundown test shows a substantial improvement in battery life over the iPad 4. IMG’s PowerVR G6430, running a moderate workload, can do so more efficiently than any of the previous generation GPUs in Apple’s SoCs. Much like the A7’s CPU cores however, there’s a wider dynamic range of power consumption with the G6430. Running at max performance I would expect to see greater GPU power consumption. The question then becomes what’s more likely? Since the majority of iOS games don’t target the A7 (and instead shoot for lower end hardware), I would expect you to see better battery life even while gaming on the iPad Air vs the iPad 3/4.
Charge Time
The iPad Air comes with the same 12W USB charger and Lightning cable that we first saw with the iPad 4. Having to only charge a 32.5W battery means that charge times are lower compared to the iPad 3 and 4:
A full charge takes a little over 4 hours to complete. The adapter delivers as much as 12W to the iPad, drawing a maximum of 13.5W at the wall. I still think the sweet spot is somewhere closer to 2.5 hours but that’s another balancing game that must be played between charge time and maintaining battery health. It’s still so much better than the ~6 hours of charge time for the iPad 3 and 5.69 hours for the iPad 4.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
444 Comments
View All Comments
zogus - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Well, I've never had an iDevice crash on me , and I've owned iPhones since 2008.You know what they say about anecdotal evidences.darkcrayon - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
I'm not sure if Anand meant a total system crash, or if he meant an app crashing due to memory use (iOS actually kills apps that request too much memory if they go overboard such that the system can't be maintained- since there is no swap file).basroil - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
"It also seemed like 15-inch notebook computers were done for a couple of years ago, then Apple launched the MacBook Pro with Retina Display. "The year after, due to poor sales of the 15" model, Apple succumbed to the market and released a 13" model to offset losses.
blacks329 - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Really? So it only took them 4.5 months to go from no plan of ever releasing a 13" inch retina MBP to going through all the processes required to make and release it, because the 15" was losing money? What world do you live in? You have no idea what you're talking about.tipoo - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
30% higher memory use is pretty huge, and on the same 1GB, 1GB 32 bit iOS devices already kicked Safari tabs out of memory and forced refreshes far more than I would like.ScottBoone - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Being an original iPad owner, I think the RAM situ on the iPad Air is going to turn out to be its achilles heal, just like the original. And when the original iPad first shipped, nearly ALL the reviewers bought the Apple PR line that "specs don't matter" blah blah blah. And sure enough, specs ABSOLUTELY mattered; the original iPad saw a premature end of life. All of the reviews **EXCEPT Anand's** have completely ignored the question of RAM: completely ignoring the fact that the iPad 3/4 already suffered from more RAM constraint than the 2 (thanks to the increased buffer size needed for the Retina screen), completely ignoring the 20-30% bigger footprint of 64-bit computing, completely ignoring that newer apps/iOS are bigger/hungrier beasts. Apple has a terrible track record of memory efficiency; I can't imagine the newest versions of iMovie and GarageBand using LESS RAM than their predecessors. Forget about the NEXT versions being more frugal. Given that the difference between the original iPad's inability to run iOS 6 (not to mention iOS 7) was 256MB of ram (under iOS 5, the original iPad has ~70MB free after device boot), and compounding the increased footprint of the buffers, iOS usage, and app growth...I can't imagine the iPad Air is going to be a long-term viable device. I'd be surprised if it enjoys a good user experience under iOS 9 (rather like the original iPad under iOS 5). Personally, I don't think Anand hammers Apple's choice of 1GB hard enough here, I guess only time will tell.aliasfox - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
+100I'm typing this on an iPad 1. A 32GB iPad 1 with 3G, so a $700+ device. The 256MB of RAM is crippling. Even my iPhone 4, using the same chip but 20% slower and with twice the RAM, is much more usable for a lot of activities. In fact, the Facebook app automatically crashes on the iPad nine times out of ten on the iPad, but is perfectly fine on the iPhone. Aside from RAM, they're just about the same.
I love using my iPad when it works, but if I'm only going to get three years tops out of a device, you're gonna have a hard time convincing me to spend $700 on one again. Even $500 is a stretch.
KoolAidMan1 - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Should have sold it when the 2 came out. The iPad 2 is still a viable device after all this time, mainly because of the RAM situation.The original iPad is like the original iPhone 3G, good for a year but far surpassed by a predecessor with much more longevity.
aliasfox - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Would've, should've, could've. Now the resale value of a first generation iPad is less than the difference between a 16GB wifi and a 32GB LTE model. I like having more space and true GPS (not to mention occasional cellular usage), so it would be mildly annoying to go from a cellular model to a wifi only model. Sure, a lot of that could be made up for by the phone (which I got over a year after my iPad), but still...Maybe a cheaper iPad mini Retina would work better, despite the smaller screen size.
darkcrayon - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Yeah the iPad 1 had a premature demise, that was a mistake, but I don't think we're going to see that with the Air- I mean the iPad 2 had a much longer lifespan (hell, it's still being sold). But you could/should just sell your iPad after a year or two and use the money to upgrade. Mobile is clearly on a much faster growth schedule than traditional computers, tablets being somewhere closer to phones than laptops.