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darngooddesign

macrumors P6
Jul 4, 2007
18,355
10,106
Atlanta, GA
...Its worth mentioning its the only iPad I have that is a cellular model (and with a current plan on it, so its activated) so maybe its because of that.

You can test this by testing with cellular turned off. You can then test with things like notifications and background app refreshed tuned off for everything and test by turning each on one by one.
 

circatee

Contributor
Original poster
Nov 30, 2014
4,492
3,048
Georgia, USA
Well, I strongly believe having my notifications on, on the iPad was causing battery drain. After having them off for a while now, the battery certainly seems much better...
 

bhodinut

macrumors regular
Jan 31, 2013
205
147
If you're using AirTags you might have more battery drain. I was losing 20-30% every night. Drove me crazy. I finally removed all the AirTags from Find My and it's back to 100% all night.
 

JamesMay82

macrumors 65816
Oct 12, 2009
1,469
1,203
Well, I strongly believe having my notifications on, on the iPad was causing battery drain. After having them off for a while now, the battery certainly seems much better...
I've got the same issues but I haven't tried any steps as ive only seen your post this morning. How did you get on in the end with it? I've had mine at 100% and not used it and 2 days later its dead.
 

Bogstandard

macrumors regular
Aug 24, 2018
208
228
Mid West
Sometimes mine can sit for a day or 2 with no battery drain at all.
At othertimes there is remarkable battery drain.
"Find My" is one if the biggest culprits.
Music(background activity) is another.
Apple has remote control of your idevice's battery...The younger the iOS version, the more unpredictable your power consumption is. Imo.
 

FeliApple

macrumors 68040
Apr 8, 2015
3,684
2,088
@rui no onna mentioned a couple of very interesting things a while ago:

-Standby drain on M1 and newer A processors is better than on previous iPads, which I agree with. My Air 5 doesn’t drop on standby almost at all. Overnight it drops 0%, it’s brilliant. I have to leave it unused for over a day for any significant drop, which doesn’t happen often.


-iPadOS has been a standby disaster on older devices, which is something they’ve mentioned several times already and I’m lucky enough not to be able to test. My only older iPad is a 9.7-inch iPad Pro on iOS 12, iPad which Apple forced out of iOS 9, And which saw no difference in standby drain, unlike screen-on time, which was obliterated by the update. The Air 5 is better than the 9.7-inch iPad Pro on both versions it’s sadly been on. That Air 2 that was posted, 100% to 98% in four hours is not good at all.

-X-series iPhones are horrible on standby. My iPhone Xʀ on iOS 12 has always been bad. Even with 100% health it was bad. I have an iPhone 6s on iOS 10 with 63% battery health and it is a lot better.

What do I mean by bad? It occasionally drops like 7% overnight on Airplane Mode. it is highly variable, occasionally dropping 0%, but that’s the rare exception rather than the norm. My 6s has never dropped like that.
 

Digitalguy

macrumors 601
Apr 15, 2019
4,636
4,463
Sometimes mine can sit for a day or 2 with no battery drain at all.
At othertimes there is remarkable battery drain.
"Find My" is one if the biggest culprits.
Music(background activity) is another.
Apple has remote control of your idevice's battery...The younger the iOS version, the more unpredictable your power consumption is. Imo.
Yes, find my and Siri are the biggest culprits, I have disabled them everywhere I could, and they are still reported in the battery statistics and the main battery users in stand-by...
 
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JamesMay82

macrumors 65816
Oct 12, 2009
1,469
1,203
I’ve just done my test of fully Charging and then leaving it in standby mode and in 12 hours it’s dropped 8% which to me is shocking. At this rate it would be dead in a week!

I thought the whole point was they can do a month or more in standby
 

papbot

macrumors 68020
May 19, 2015
2,303
1,077
I’ve just done my test of fully Charging and then leaving it in standby mode and in 12 hours it’s dropped 8% which to me is shocking. At this rate it would be dead in a week!

I thought the whole point was they can do a month or more in standby
I’ve never left mine alone for a month to check this. But occasionally for a day and it will be at 100% when I get back to it so it might make it a month in standby without charging. But I’ll never get to test that assumption.
 

darngooddesign

macrumors P6
Jul 4, 2007
18,355
10,106
Atlanta, GA
When the iPad Pro 11' (2019) is not in use, should the battery still drain, drastically?
The unit is not off, but, I feel if I have not used the unit for a few days (despite leaving the device with at least 75-85% battery), when I return to it, the device is sometimes in the 20-25% range, on battery or lower.

Normally, I close all applications, before I finish using it. I expect very little drain. But...
Put it in low-power mode while not in use.
 
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rui no onna

Contributor
Oct 25, 2013
14,906
13,232
I’ve just done my test of fully Charging and then leaving it in standby mode and in 12 hours it’s dropped 8% which to me is shocking. At this rate it would be dead in a week!

I thought the whole point was they can do a month or more in standby

I think the last time I could get one month standby was on iOS 6. Even iOS 10, I get just 3-4 weeks.

Latest iOS versions just phone home too much. You’d need to put the device on airplane mode to get one month standby.
 

JamesMay82

macrumors 65816
Oct 12, 2009
1,469
1,203
It’s now dropped 22% in 27 hours! Ha it’s really bugging me. I think like mentioned I’ll just turn off all the notifications.

I just remembered that When I charged to 100% from being dead I left it off charge but I didn’t enter my pin so the notifications hadn’t come through in the 8hrs it had been left and it was still on 100% ..

So notifications must be the main battery killer
 
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SoYoung

macrumors 68000
Jul 3, 2015
1,545
955
Got my M2 12.9 and has no battery drain in standby. iPad can sit there for 24 h and 1%
My old 12.9 iPad Pro from 2018 is like that but not my new M2 12,9. Just today it lost 5% in 12 hours when on standby. I don’t understand why because I restore my new iPad from the same back up as the old.
 

BigMcGuire

Cancelled
Jan 10, 2012
9,832
14,032
Put it in low-power mode while not in use.
Agreed.

I can’t be the only one who does this yes?

1669521692245.png
 

papbot

macrumors 68020
May 19, 2015
2,303
1,077
I don’t turn anything off and my ipad will still be at 100% 12 hours or more after I removed it from the charger. That’s as long as I normally go without using mine. I have left it once or twice for an entire day and it might have dropped to 98-97%.
 

JamesMay82

macrumors 65816
Oct 12, 2009
1,469
1,203
I don’t turn anything off and my ipad will still be at 100% 12 hours or more after I removed it from the charger. That’s as long as I normally go without using mine. I have left it once or twice for an entire day and it might have dropped to 98-97%.
is yours a cellular model?
 

ndouglas

macrumors 6502a
Jun 1, 2022
720
635
@rui no onna mentioned a couple of very interesting things a while ago:

-Standby drain on M1 and newer A processors is better than on previous iPads, which I agree with. My Air 5 doesn’t drop on standby almost at all. Overnight it drops 0%, it’s brilliant. I have to leave it unused for over a day for any significant drop, which doesn’t happen often.

This has been my experience too —^, must be the M1 chip… My ipads have been the only devices that don’t drain battery at all in a noticeable way. I only wish that were the case for other stuff, my watch and iphone lose easily ~20% overnight, not sure the # for my laptop Macbook 2019 (intel) but probably 10%.

….

What do I mean by bad? It occasionally drops like 7% overnight on Airplane Mode. it is highly variable, occasionally dropping 0%, but that’s the rare exception rather than the norm. My 6s has never dropped like that.
7% is less than ideal but pretty darn good compared to my personal experience with most iphones, and the Watch, which have always lost at least 10% overnight for me, sometimes a lot more. Interesting to hear that your 6s didn’t do that. (EDIT okay I guess using Airplane Mode that’s not very good either…)
 

FeliApple

macrumors 68040
Apr 8, 2015
3,684
2,088
This has been my experience too —^, must be the M1 chip… My ipads have been the only devices that don’t drain battery at all in a noticeable way. I only wish that were the case for other stuff, my watch and iphone lose easily ~20% overnight, not sure the # for my laptop Macbook 2019 (intel) but probably 10%.


7% is less than ideal but pretty darn good compared to my personal experience with most iphones, and the Watch, which have always lost at least 10% overnight for me, sometimes a lot more. Interesting to hear that your 6s didn’t do that. (EDIT okay I guess using Airplane Mode that’s not very good either…)
Yes, iPads are amazing on standby, they’ve always been. Some people have said that iPadOS shattered that on older devices (the 9.7-inch iPad Pro’s standby battery life has been described as bad on iPadOS 13 onwards) but that’s been the only instance of bad standby I’ve heard of. A friend has an iPad Mini 1 on iOS 9 (so, fully updated, even worse) and they’ve frequently praised it, sending me screenshots of the usage page and it being like 300 hours with 70% remaining, too good. Every single iPad I’ve tried has been amazing, with the caveat of “I haven’t tried an iPad older than the Air 5 on iPadOS, which has been pointed out as a problem on older models”. I only used iOS 9 and 12 on my 9.7-inch iPad Pro, and iOS 12 on a 6th Gen iPad. All three combinations are amazing.

Regarding iPhones, 20% like you said earlier is way too much and probably indicates a problem. Even 7% would indicate a problem, but I know there isn’t because it is highly variable. It drops 0% sometimes. I’ve never been able to explain that. I have an iPhone 5c (again, on iOS 10, fully updated, incredible) and it hasn’t dropped from 100% after 10 hours of standby. Some people have mentioned that those versions of iOS are better on standby, maybe it’s that, but it is still impressive. For whatever it’s worth, the iPhone 6s I mentioned is also on iOS 10. The Xʀ is on iOS 12.

You’ve said your experience has always been poor. Which iPhones have you used?
 
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ndouglas

macrumors 6502a
Jun 1, 2022
720
635
I’ve had the iphone 3GS, 7, and now SE 2020. I do use it to check weather email etc. for a few minutes during the night, between it being 100% at night after showering aroung 8pm, and ~80% by morning, about 8am. I suspect it’s related to sleep tracking which I’ve done on Fitbit app for some years, until switching to Apple Watch about 1 year ago. But who knows it could be other stuff too or just the device and its much smaller than iPad battery. I do have all background notifications off even though that doesn’t seem to make any difference.

About iPads, I‘m glad to hear others have had similar positive experience with their battery life, for me I’ve only had 2021 iPad Pro now, and before the 2019 iPad Air, so no experience with older models… but even just those two, definitely makes it all the more noticeable how my dang phone and watch have to be charged 1-2x per day compared to ipad needing it wayy less.
 
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