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brewmonkey

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 17, 2016
216
142
With no active apps, background refresh off, and wifi/bluetooth disabled, my battery drains 10% overnight. No activity is reported in the battery control panel. In many years of using iPads I have never seen anything like this. Is this a known issue that might be resolved in software, or is this iPad's battery defective?
 
Do a hard power restart and see if it clears the issue. Could be something constantly running that you can't see and I don't mean an app, more likely a service.
 
Did you try turning down brightness a bit? I hadn't noticed that my brightness was set high - I turned it down some. Battery life improved pretty dramatically...

(oops... I read more carefully and your original post is about overnight drain, when screen is off - please disregard this post - I can't figure out how to delete it)
 
Do you have the Pencil and are you leaving it attached overnight? Doing this has been causing battery drain like the what you’re describing.
 
Did you find the cause? My new 12.9 WiFi has been having terrible drain. I blamed Facebook at first, but that’s not it. Thinking about taking it back, if it doesn’t improve.
 
Do a hard power restart and see if it clears the issue. Could be something constantly running that you can't see and I don't mean an app, more likely a service.

A restart would shut these off. If I need to simulate a battery pull and kill the os and all running applications is questionable.
 
Did you find the cause? My new 12.9 WiFi has been having terrible drain. I blamed Facebook at first, but that’s not it. Thinking about taking it back, if it doesn’t improve.

Can you put some numbers out there? With airplane mode on, how much does it drain overnight?
 
Can you put some numbers out there? With airplane mode on, how much does it drain overnight?

I'm not sure. I didn't have it in airplane mode, but it was at 30-something percent this morning (32% I think) and was at 19% when I came home. So, it lost about 12% in about 10 hours. (Edit to clarify...it was at home unused while I was at work.)

I'm going to charge it up to 100% again and restart it. And drop the Apple pencil. Then see how it does tomorrow.
 
With no active apps, background refresh off, and wifi/bluetooth disabled, my battery drains 10% overnight. No activity is reported in the battery control panel. In many years of using iPads I have never seen anything like this. Is this a known issue that might be resolved in software, or is this iPad's battery defective?
Is the iPad brand new? Did you just restore from a previous backup or login to a previously used iCloud account? If so, it’s possible the iPad is still attempting to download/sync data (especially photos and music) which can take 48 hrs or more to fully complete.
 
With no active apps, background refresh off, and wifi/bluetooth disabled, my battery drains 10% overnight. No activity is reported in the battery control panel. In many years of using iPads I have never seen anything like this. Is this a known issue that might be resolved in software, or is this iPad's battery defective?
My iPad Pro 10.5" has been experiencing ~10% drain each day as well, just like your situation (I have wifi turned on and connected to my home network though). Genius Bar ran diagnostics which came back with a complete clean bill of health--guess that's both a good and a bad thing for my iPad). Currently I'm running another battery drain test/check but this time I wiped my iPad and set it up as new, did not restore my backup to it, put it in Airplane Mode, disabled background refresh and notifications (the latter should in theory prevent any home/lock screen activity), and did not sign into iCloud and iTunes (thus giving my iPad no reason to even try to talk to iCloud or iTunes); I will check on battery usage at the end of the week to see what the numbers look like.
 
My iPad Pro 10.5" has been experiencing ~10% drain each day as well, just like your situation (I have wifi turned on and connected to my home network though). Genius Bar ran diagnostics which came back with a complete clean bill of health--guess that's both a good and a bad thing for my iPad). Currently I'm running another battery drain test/check but this time I wiped my iPad and set it up as new, did not restore my backup to it, put it in Airplane Mode, disabled background refresh and notifications (the latter should in theory prevent any home/lock screen activity), and did not sign into iCloud and iTunes (thus giving my iPad no reason to even try to talk to iCloud or iTunes); I will check on battery usage at the end of the week to see what the numbers look like.

Will be interesting to hear your results. I sure hope the new version (12.3) helps with this issue as suggested by @AJTC.
 
brewmonkey--talk about impeccable timing of your post! Ok so I checked on my Pro yesterday (Sunday), which would make it just about a full 7 days after I took it off the charger at 100%--remaining charge level shows 95% (I suppose that's a good thing even though a very small part of me still wonders how an iPad that hadn't been touched at all during the past 7 days can still manage to drain 5% but I'll take it as a positive anyways) so I guess that means possibly either one or more of my installed apps is problemetic and/or maybe an issue with Wifi communication (or radio). I've restored my backup and now am running my regular drain test (started today/Monday, Wifi turned on but BT is off) to see how things fare at the end of the week.

Stay tuned!
 
brewmonkey--talk about impeccable timing of your post! Ok so I checked on my Pro yesterday (Sunday), which would make it just about a full 7 days after I took it off the charger at 100%--remaining charge level shows 95% (I suppose that's a good thing even though a very small part of me still wonders how an iPad that hadn't been touched at all during the past 7 days can still manage to drain 5% but I'll take it as a positive anyways) so I guess that means possibly either one or more of my installed apps is problemetic and/or maybe an issue with Wifi communication (or radio). I've restored my backup and now am running my regular drain test (started today/Monday, Wifi turned on but BT is off) to see how things fare at the end of the week.

Stay tuned!

Can we get an update?

How did it fare? I find it ridiculous that we have to put these $800+ machines into airplane mode everytime we stop using it. Why can't they just put out a software update that will do this automatically for us when the device is locked.
 
Can we get an update?

How did it fare? I find it ridiculous that we have to put these $800+ machines into airplane mode everytime we stop using it. Why can't they just put out a software update that will do this automatically for us when the device is locked.

Because most people still want to receive notifications.
 
Can we get an update?

How did it fare? I find it ridiculous that we have to put these $800+ machines into airplane mode everytime we stop using it. Why can't they just put out a software update that will do this automatically for us when the device is locked.
Slight correction--for the test I ran that I mentioned at the end of post #15 I did restore my backup *but* left Airplane mode on (starting the test after a full charge); after about 2 days into that test it's showing <1% usage (reporting 100% full but battery usage chart does show a very tiny green bar sliver on one of the two days, hence my saying <1%), thus leaving the possibility that it's either a rogue app and/or wifi-related. I'm currently running another test but this time I've added to the test turning off Airplane Mode, turning on Wifi and connecting to my 2.4 GHz N, and BT turned off--we'll see what the drain is like after a few days.
 
I got the same issue when I first bought my iPad Pro 11
Turns out the reason is the Tap to Wake function
If toggle on, it drains 1% at around an hour or less
The problem is still here even I upgraded to iOS 12.3
 
Is the iPad brand new? Did you just restore from a previous backup or login to a previously used iCloud account? If so, it’s possible the iPad is still attempting to download/sync data (especially photos and music) which can take 48 hrs or more to fully complete.
Thank you, my brand new 11" was dead this morning, i opened photos and it says updating over 6000 photos. So i am sure this is the issue..... Even though it says the lock screen is draining the battery.
 
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