Indeed. The economics are off. If battery life degrades too fast you need to buy a new item. Then only the price point of the base iPad makes sense. Do also think Apple is using worse batteries than before.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
iPad Air Pretty disappointed concerning battery new iPad Air
- Thread starter grandM
- Start date
-
- Tags
- ipad air m3
- Sort by reaction score
- Battery capacity percentages aren’t exact, they are approximations based on measurements with some error margins.
- Battery capacity doesn’t decrease at a constant rate. It may stay at 99% for the rest of the year.
- Being analog, chemical devices, there is a certain spread in initial capacity across units. Some may start at effectively 103% (but still display as 100%), while others start at just 100%.
- According to Apple, “iPad batteries are designed to retain 80 percent of their original capacity at 1000 complete charge cycles, depending on how they're regularly used and charged.” So I would only start to worry once the percentage vs. cycle count veers significantly off that design trajectory. Again, taking into account that capacity decrease isn’t necessarily linear.
My iPad Pro M4 is down to 96% after ~13 months and 151 cycles (with the 80% limit applied since new), and my 16 Pro Max is still at 100% after ~9 months and 126 cycles (with 100% charge limit).
My iPad takes a lot more abuse than my iPhone. I rapid charge it and regularly run tasks that heat it up (high screen brightness, multi-tasking, compute intensive tasks like Shapr3D). In contrast, my iPhone is slow charged and gets mostly light use.
Don't worry about the number. Batteries are consumables and will degrade over time, this is true of all devices using LiPo batteries (or similar).
Just enjoy your device 🙂
My iPad takes a lot more abuse than my iPhone. I rapid charge it and regularly run tasks that heat it up (high screen brightness, multi-tasking, compute intensive tasks like Shapr3D). In contrast, my iPhone is slow charged and gets mostly light use.
Don't worry about the number. Batteries are consumables and will degrade over time, this is true of all devices using LiPo batteries (or similar).
Just enjoy your device 🙂
Attachments
As someone else suggested, the relevant consideration is the number of charging cycles, not the amount of time you have owned it. A 1% loss after 71 cycles is not out of the ordinary. 71 cycles in just two months suggests a heavy usage pattern for you.
It`s about battery Run time anyway.
How many hours you get out of it?
I get about an hour for every 10%.
Apple says 10 hours battery life.
Gas gauges on Vehicles are not very accurate are they when low are they?
Use it. Stop worrying about it or buy another or trade it in.
1%
How many hours you get out of it?
I get about an hour for every 10%.
Apple says 10 hours battery life.
Gas gauges on Vehicles are not very accurate are they when low are they?
Use it. Stop worrying about it or buy another or trade it in.
1%
1% drop in battery, 40% increase in anxiety, and 50% drop in quality of life.
It’s no big deal battery drop isn’t linear, it may sit on the same number for months and may drop few % in a week, and stay the same. As long as it is in margin and holding the charge, enjoy the device.
It’s no big deal battery drop isn’t linear, it may sit on the same number for months and may drop few % in a week, and stay the same. As long as it is in margin and holding the charge, enjoy the device.
It's a ROUGH estimate, not some gospel truth about the battery. According to coconutBattery the "battery health" metric on my MacBook Air M4 has gone up since I got it and then come back down, which should tell you plenty about the precision of this metric. You're meant to look at this as an approximation and look at general trends over time -- if you even look at it at all.
Last edited:
It’s not 1% loss in 2 months, it’s 1% loss in 71 recharge cycles. That’s pretty trivial. Batteries degrade as a function of number of charge cycles.
You’ve lost 1%. But what does that actually mean other than being a stat on the screen.
I’m not belittling you, but have you noticed any actual “real-world” loss of capacity? Is there any significant difference in usage.
To put it another way, if you wouldn’t have noticed any difference in performance (or maximum duration of sustained performance) if you hadn’t seen this loss of 1%, have you lost anything at all?
A stat is just a stat. If you’re unsure, run the iPad from 100% to 0%, time it, and then you have a baseline you get some more useful real-world. Apple’s “battery health” metrics are not necessarily overly accurate or carved in stone. To put it another way, if you had moved from 99.000001% to 98.99999% - it’ll be rounded to a 1% difference but even the difference is a fluctuation that is within the margin of error. The number of cycles is an accurate stat, the percentage is not, but ew ally you can have a low cycle count but heavily battery capacity loss if you keep your device plugged in a lot of the time (more a MacBook problem than an iPad problem, to be fair).
Or, if it is a new machine, and you still have a warranty, get a replacement, if only for your own peace of mind.
I’m not belittling you, but have you noticed any actual “real-world” loss of capacity? Is there any significant difference in usage.
To put it another way, if you wouldn’t have noticed any difference in performance (or maximum duration of sustained performance) if you hadn’t seen this loss of 1%, have you lost anything at all?
A stat is just a stat. If you’re unsure, run the iPad from 100% to 0%, time it, and then you have a baseline you get some more useful real-world. Apple’s “battery health” metrics are not necessarily overly accurate or carved in stone. To put it another way, if you had moved from 99.000001% to 98.99999% - it’ll be rounded to a 1% difference but even the difference is a fluctuation that is within the margin of error. The number of cycles is an accurate stat, the percentage is not, but ew ally you can have a low cycle count but heavily battery capacity loss if you keep your device plugged in a lot of the time (more a MacBook problem than an iPad problem, to be fair).
Or, if it is a new machine, and you still have a warranty, get a replacement, if only for your own peace of mind.
Yes. If the battery has noticeably degraded (in actual life, not simply percentage stat) over a two month period, then the battery’s faulty and needs replacing.
Yall being trolled and you dont even know it
This is actually fantastic. 500 cycles or 2 years is typically what it should take to get to 80%, in a worst case but still acceptable scenario. You've lost 1/20th of theoretical max capacity in 1/12th of the time and 14.2% of the cycles, so you're well ahead of the curve in both cases.
My MBP has 86.7% battery health with 74 cycles (I don't use it on battery much) and the battery will turn 3 years old on 7/18. I expect it will take at least another year to drop below 80% health, at which point I'll have it replaced, assuming I don't just upgrade to a newer MBP.
My MBP has 86.7% battery health with 74 cycles (I don't use it on battery much) and the battery will turn 3 years old on 7/18. I expect it will take at least another year to drop below 80% health, at which point I'll have it replaced, assuming I don't just upgrade to a newer MBP.
It‘a not that Apple’s batteries are deliberately getting worse, it’s that devices are far more powerful, and all those far more powerful and higher resolution components need more power. Yes, Apple have improved their power usage to performance ratio, but ultimately the device you have now is needs far more power than the device you had ten years ago.
Bar a new battery technology ( the holy grail for EVs far more that computing devices) you have to accept that computing devices need power, and the more power and higher spec the components, generally the more power they use.
A Mac Studio M3 Ultra will do more damage to your electricity bill than an entry level Mac Mini M4. At the end of the day, physics is physics and physics is real, it still applies even when it’s inconvenient.
Last edited:
Agreed. I do feel that it sometimes gets pretty hot. On the backside that is. Not on the screenside. Running few apps at the moment. Switching between X on safari and Disney+. In the past I noticed X seems to warm up the device. Don’t know why. But I just quickly pulled my hand away from the back. Cools off fast though. Seems to coincide with energy usage. Used it a lot though today.
Edit: it truly seems to be X in Safari.
Attachments
Last edited:
Seconded on the heavy usage pattern.
My 16ProMax is still at 100% after 116 cycles, and it's seven months old.
I still wouldn't worry about it.
Probably good, for multiple reasons, not to use Twitter at all.
MR needs a bot that scans new posts for anything related to battery health, posts an automated reply, then locks the thread.
More information is always good in my opinion. But people worry because they now have the data, whereas before they simply didn’t unless they went looking for it.
Worrying is pointless. Not only is battery health irrelevant to determine battery life, but the only relevant information is whether it is too updated.
To combat the misinformation that batteries were better before, I will add this data point. I periodically checked my 9.7-inch iPad Pro’s information with Coconut Battery, since I bought it in September 2016. Battery life was like-new throughout the three years it was on iOS 9, suffering a 25% impact when Apple forced it into iOS 12 three years later. The iPad remains on iOS 12 today.
This is the data:
It suffered a catastrophic drop at the beginning, dropping to 91% (!!!) after only one year and 164 cycles. Almost nine years (!!!) after purchase, it remains above 80%.
Don’t worry about it.
Worrying is pointless. Not only is battery health irrelevant to determine battery life, but the only relevant information is whether it is too updated.
To combat the misinformation that batteries were better before, I will add this data point. I periodically checked my 9.7-inch iPad Pro’s information with Coconut Battery, since I bought it in September 2016. Battery life was like-new throughout the three years it was on iOS 9, suffering a 25% impact when Apple forced it into iOS 12 three years later. The iPad remains on iOS 12 today.
This is the data:
It suffered a catastrophic drop at the beginning, dropping to 91% (!!!) after only one year and 164 cycles. Almost nine years (!!!) after purchase, it remains above 80%.
Don’t worry about it.
I usually chalk that sort of thing up to chemistry being chemistry.
👍 Now that's what I call a professional pessimist.😄 I start to worry when my battery starts to drop below 110%.....
But seriously now, a 1% drop after a few months with 71cycles wouldn't give me the slightest cause for concern.
One often reads on these forums that Apple products are not what they used to be in terms of general satisfaction and longevity. Fwiw this is coming to you from a 13 year old A1286 MacBook Pro9,1 (Mid 2012). The battery is genuine Apple, changed in 2019 (6 years ago). Top toolbar shows 97%, system report shows cycle count 943, battery condition 'normal'. So hopefuly I still have a few years of satisfactory performance remaining with this 6 year old battery.
With my long Apple collection experience, 2012 was a golden year - especially for these MacBooks, and I still wonder how many Apple silicon series Macs will still be going strong in a comparable 13 years time.
Absolutely, I couldn't agree more! My wife has one, still in daily operation (now with an SSD to improve performance) and it's never missed a beat. Truly marvellous those 2012 Mini's for upgradeability.