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.
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Kvaern - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
You bought a first generation tech device and if you expected that to bring solid performance to the table for 5-8 years then I'm afraid it's your expectations that are the issue at hand, not the device.aliasfox - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Well, I knew I should've waited for the iPad 2, but I was taking a long trip in the fall of 2010 and it was by far the best option for internet connectivity at the time.As for 5-8 years... well, it's more that I expect $700 to last me longer. All of my other 3-4 yr old devices may be beat up, slow, and not great, but unlike the iPad 1 (on iOS5), they are still reasonably usable.
zogus - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
As an owner of iPad 1 who've found the lack of iOS 6 update frustrating, I understand your sentiment completely, and I'm kind of on the fence myself regarding the new iPads.There is one major difference between the iPad 1 situation and iPad Air, however: iPad 1 was followed less than three months later by iPhone 4, which had twice as much RAM, at which point anyone remotely tech-y could see the writing on the wall. iPad Air is not likely to have that kind of upstaging for a couple of years since iPhone 5S is still brand new, and the large number of 512MB units (iPhone 4/4S, iPad 2, iPad mini) need to be taken off the market first. Apple cannot afford to bloat iOS to the point where 1GB is insufficient for a some years to come.
aliasfox - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
At the time the iPad 1 came out, it had equivalent RAM to the (then top of the line) 3GS, and twice as much as the first two iPhones and first few generations if iPod Touches. Granted, between the iPad 2/3, iPhone 4/4s, and iPad mini they've sold a boatload more 512MB devices, but the difference is a matter of scale.akdj - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Yet with an A7 device (iPhone 5s/iPad Air/iPad mini w/retina) one can now run 32 tracks in Garage Band vs. 16 on the same memory 'starved' iPad 4? More memory will come...it's a non-isssue. The iPad 2 is now in the hands of 10s of thousands of pilots on commercial airlines. Their Jep Charts and approach plates...user manuals and updates to said charts and plates work just fine.Guys/Gals....this isn't Windows. This isn't Android. Apple's conservative RAM approach significantly improves battery life...and doesn't at all seem to affect actually running currently available apps that haven't been built with iOS7 in mind, much less 64bit programming! The vast majority of apps currently available are optimized to the A5 processor with 512mb of RAM. You'll be fine...I know I sure am on both my iPad 4 and iPhone 5s. If you need 10 tabs open on Safari while manipulating photos and listening to music, buy a laptop!
stacey94 - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Isn't RAM fairly cheap anyway? It's not consuming that much power either. I don't understand the logic behind skimping on it.Spunjji - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
Planned obsolescence. Simple as that.nedjinski - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 still beats it - sorry.Fly Molo - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
...That just happened.dragonsqrrl - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
...yep, unfortunately