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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michal1980 - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Did you read? I was talking about windows 8.1, you know the big upgrade given away 2 weeks agoI know that in iSheep land windows doesn't exist.
abazigal - Saturday, November 2, 2013 - link
He's probably writing it even as we speak, and it will likely be posted in a matter a time.Anand has a ton of devices to review, so they have to set a priority. Not to mention that he has pretty much stated that he works on an iMac, so I imagine using Win8 actually takes away from his productivity time.
algalli - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Your right Windows 8.1 will be used by tens of people not hundreds of millions of people, at least in the tablet worldjecastejon - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
And by the same standard, objectiveness and evidences you present I say you are paid by Apples's competitors.darwiniandude - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Really?? Strange... The detailed review I just read complained (politely) about Apple not letting them dissect (cut open) review (loan) units. It also mentioned GUI performance frame rate drops in the multitasking UI and complained that due to 64bit they really need to ship with 2GB ram rather than the 1GB they come with. I can guarantee most other reviews out there will not mention these particular technical negatives. Anandtech reviews are thorough.Rickschwar - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
Although I haven't seen too much Apple bias from AnandTech in the past, this is one of the most biased reviews I have ever read. This is surprising because normally AnandTech is the “gold standard” for all things technical. The reviewer talks about the iPad Air like it’s a revolutionary product, when there is little new about it. Apple was playing catch up in many ways and other tablets have many advantages over it. For example, the iPad 4 was thicker than many Android tablets. In fact, at least ten Android tablets were thinner than the iPad 4. The Air is only 1.9 mm thinner than the iPad 4 and tablets like the older Sony Experia Z are still significantly thinner than the iPad Air is (7.5mm vs. 6.9mm). Of course this wasn't mentioned in the article. Even when it comes to weight, the iPad Air isn’t dramatically lighter than the Experia Z (469g vs. 495g). That’s not mentioned in the article either.Since I’m in the market for a new tablet and I’ve owned two iPads in the past, I was hoping for big things with the new iPad, but for me and others it was a “meh” release. The same old display, the same A7 processor, and little real innovation. CNET agrees saying “Functionally, the iPad Air is nearly identical to last year’s model, offering only faster performance and better video chatting.”
The most ironic part for my is the fact than more 90% of this article is based on benchmarks -- even though AnandTech has made it clear how easy it is to game benchmarks and others (including an article I wrote over a year ago published at Mostly-tech.com) have made compelling cases that benchmarks do not predict real world performance. This article mostly ignores real world performance and pretends that Android tablets don’t exist.
After this article I will never look at AnandTech the same again. At least the CNET and Engadget reviews covered some of the limitations of this product.
- Rick
abazigal - Saturday, November 2, 2013 - link
The ironic thing about your statement is that for the moment at least, only Android OEMs have been found guilty of gaming benchmarks, not Apple. So doing any benchmark tests at this juncture would actually favour Apple's competitors, despite this being a review of an Apple product. So I don't see what reason you have to complain, when the odds are stacked in Android's favour anyways.Besides, Anand has thoroughly dissected the A7 chip in his 5s review, and concluded that it is actually faster and more power-efficient compared to the higher-clocked, quad-core processors found in Android phones and tablets. The fact remains that Android and most mobile apps generally aren't optimised with 4-cores in mind either. So for all intents and purposes, Android tablets may as well not exist, since they will likely lose to the iPad in terms of real-world performance anyways.
Also, the thing with these products is that they are ultimately a package deal. People don't just look at 1 single defining factor and buy a device based solely on that. Likewise, I am definitely not going to blindly buy the thinnest tablet in the market without first considering other factors like specs and availability of apps. You are not going to find that mythical Android tablet which is thinner, lighter, has a longer battery life, better screen, while boasting a larger market of apps and content.
I am sorry, but you are not going to find a more objective and detailed review anywhere else. You want the iPad air to be bashed, go hand out at some pro-android forum instead.
ADGrant - Saturday, November 2, 2013 - link
"Same old A7 processor". You look like a complete idiot when you post something like that. The A7 was announced less than a month ago.sunflowerfly - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
Anand biased? I do not believe that. They have no trouble pointing out Apple's flaws, and every product has them, nothing is perfect. The best products should win, and right now that happens to be Apple a lot of the time.ssiu - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
No 2GB RAM; hope dashed :(Does that mean an iPad 4 (which can only run 32-bit code) will end up "less RAM starved" than iPad Air running 64-bit code?