Huge battery drain on Air 5 & 17

[ReardenMetal]

Something is definitely working in the background. That small activity spinner in the upper right hand corner of the screen won't go away sometimes. My iPad Pro 10.5 will not hold a charge in standby anymore. It used to be a champ with an iron grip for standby battery prior to this update.

As an experiment, went to sleep with 60%-70% charge. Woke up with 5% charge. That's not right.

Tried a hard reset and cleared the Safari browsing data, cookies, etc. Will see...this happened once before with an iPadOS update. Can't recall specifically if Apple patched it then or if I had to wipe and restore.

 

[ReardenMetal]

Since performing a wipe & iCloud restore on my iPad Pro 10.5 yesterday, the battery settings page showed me something interesting. Seems the Home app, which I haven't even opened or used since the restore, is binge eating my battery.

The battery usage screen didn't show this kind of usage about the Home app before the wipe & restore.

Now, I'm thinking I'll have to leave a home and possibly set it up again. I'm not a Home app expert. Maybe this will help someone else too.

 

[sduck]

iPad OS 17 and 17.1 were ok, I got normal battery usage, but with the 17.2 public beta version, my battery is depleting at about double the rate it normally does. This is what the feedback app is for...

 

[Nate455]

I have not noticed a huge drain with any of the updates.

 

[thecautioners]

Air 5 WiFi. Went to bed at 90%, woke up to 78%. I’m a little disappointed. I’m going to try changing some settings suggested in this thread.

 

[mfehr]

I experienced battery drain with my iPad Air 5 as well. I went to apple to replace the battery. Their diagnose showed that the battery still was at 91%. Hence, battery was not replaced. Instead, I reset my iPad and restored all data from the backup. Since then, the battery lives longer and the drain seems to have gone.

So, I saved money and co2 emissions in not replacing the battery and I am now happily using My air 5 again.

 

[pikkpoiss]

I have battery standby drain wih my iPad mini 6 as well with iPadOS 17. Goes down like crazy over night(or on idle during thr day), my iPad used to be super good with standby energy consumption, so I assume it is an OS problem.

In settings under battery usage it won’t have any apps consuming energy, so it must be the OS.

 

[Reverend Benny]

I have battery standby drain wih my iPad mini 6 as well with iPadOS 17. Goes down like crazy over night(or on idle during thr day), my iPad used to be super good with standby energy consumption, so I assume it is an OS problem.

In settings under battery usage it won’t have any apps consuming energy, so it must be the OS.

What happens if you turn on airplane mode for a night?

 

[pdoherty]

Anyone else noticing huge battery drain since iPadOS 17? I can watch the battery percentage going down, even with power saver mode enabled.

Yes - this is ridiculous. I just took my iPad Pro 10.5 off the charger with 100% charge and I've been on the couch less than 10 minutes and the battery has dropped rapidly to 85%! At this rate it won't run two hours on a full charge. I have the latest update (17.1.2). Apple needs to fix battery drain ASAP as this is quite ridiculous.

EDIT: 17 minutes later I'm at 69% - sheesh

 

[FeliApple]

Yes - this is ridiculous. I just took my iPad Pro 10.5 off the charger with 100% charge and I've been on the couch less than 10 minutes and the battery has dropped rapidly to 85%! At this rate it won't run two hours on a full charge. I have the latest update (17.1.2). Apple needs to fix battery drain ASAP as this is quite ridiculous.

EDIT: 17 minutes later I'm at 69% - sheesh

Sadly, I think the 10.5-inch iPad Pro was just obliterated by updates and there’s nothing you can do. I don’t think Apple will fix it.

This is a screenshot from a video I found of a 10.5-inch iPad Pro user complaining about battery life on iPadOS 16:

That’s 1 hour and 15 minutes of screen-on time from 100% to almost dead. And that’s on iPadOS 16. They really pushed too far this time. Reminds me of the iPhone 6s on iOS 15. Battery life-wise, these devices are just gone regardless of what you do or how you use them.

 

[Reverend Benny]

So I've been running iPad OS 17 on a number on devices, both personal and business devices, and also experimented a little with network settings and these are my findings so far.

Personal devices: Both runing iOS 16.7.2 before updating.
* iPad OS 17 on iPad Pro 2 (10,5) is no different from iOS 16, haven't messed around with settings or network settings as it isn't my device. Its hooked to Wifi bot not sure what frequency or Wi-Fi standard (guessing WiFi5).
* iPad OS 17 on iPad Air 3, same as above but this is hooked up to a Wifi 4 router, guessing 2,4 ghz.

Both of the above seem to be running as they always have and haven't got any reports from the users that they drain quicker or feel laggy.

* iPad OS 17 on M1 iPad pro 11" (16GB) with 2TB of storage (used about 1/4). Messed around and forced it on 5Ghz to see if that has an effect on the drain. Also set the "astronomy" feature as a background pic and front. This is what I use daily, mostly in my house so far so connected to the same network.
Fairly filled with apps but no social media apps. Mostly use it for streaming, videoediting, stage-manager and web-browsing.

I do sense that it drains a tiny bit more battery than on iOS 16, not much but I think I can notice it. Its not nearly as mad as some of the numbers given in this thread tho.
I think it all started after setting up the astronomy thing and the 5ghz change, but it could be a number of other things as apps are updated automatically and can cause drain. Haven't turned off background updates yet which can have a big impact.

Will try and disable the astronomy feature and go back to 2,4 ghz to see if it makes a difference at some point, but as its barely noticeble i might keep it in for a little bit longer just so make sure it its not me reading into things that's not there.

At work: (Mix of devices, mostly iPad Air and iPad pro from 2020 or later)
No reports of a crazy battery drain from any of the users so far, but its hard to know since the usage pattern and environment are very different between users what they are being used to.
Some use cellular only, some are only on WiFi and the offices has somewhat different network equipment too which makes it hard to troubleshoot should there be any issues.
Our main issue right now are M1 and M2 Macbooks and network connectivity issues.

We will be updating our CEOs iPad (12.9 ipad pro 4) to iOS 17 next week. This person is very sensitive to bugs and changes. If there would be a slight change in battery consumtion, lagginess or similar he will let me know...that's for sure.

 

[Regulus67]

An update on the battery drain issue.

I have had no issues since I made the changes, as far as I can remember.
Last time I charged to 100% was Friday noon. I used FaceTime and Safari for 3.5 hours on Saturday, and even some on Friday. But I can't say how long I used it after the charge, that day.
Battery is now at 36%, 3 days later

iPadOS 17.2

 

[dotzero123]

I reset all settings this morning and turned off automatic updates. It did seem to make a difference but I used it lightly today. For some background, my iPad was replaced under warranty yesterday. When I brought it home it went from roughly 89 percent to 30 percent in just a few hours. Today, it was 100 percent, used it for about an hour and put it in clamshell mode with keyboard. It was more than 80% at the end of the day. In the last few weeks, the battery life has been draining like crazy. Hoping these changes do the trick.