Are you as fed up with battery life claims as I am?
In the quest to make lighter and slimmer devices there’s a trend for manufacturers to trim the battery when releasing newer models of phones or tablets. They all do it, but it just so happens that I have a couple of iPads on the desk in front of me that I can use to demonstrate what happens when batteries get smaller. This is something that has come up recently in various online conversations so I thought I’d write a few words on the subject, but please don’t read this as an attack on Apple. What I’m about to write could apply to just about any tech manufacturer.
The two iPads on my desk are an iPad Air 2 (currently top of Apple’s ten-ish inch range), and an iPad 4th Generation, which is two generations back. They both have the same screen size, the same memory capacity, the same connectivity options, and both have exactly the same apps installed. They are even signed in to the same Apple account, and have the same email accounts and notifications enabled. To all intents and purposes one is an exact mirror of the other.
I do exactly the same things with them too: Watch a bit of Netflix, iPlayer or Amazon Prime, or stream other content from the Plex server running on my NAS; check emails, Twitter and Slack; play Scrabble with my parents or play Threes by myself; flick a few Angry Birds; check the news and weather; set stuff to record on my Sky+ box, etc. Each iPad probably gets a similar amount of use, too. So why two? Well, one is upstairs and one downstairs. Yes, I really am that lazy!
Oh, and before I continue, I should say that for the tasks I’ve listed above I don't notice any performance difference between the two machines. I realise that the Air 2 has a much faster CPU and graphics system, but I think it’s wasted on people like me. If your game playing includes the latest high-resolution driving games or immersive FPV then you might spot a difference. Or if you use your tablet for rendering tasks or re-encoding audio (why would you?) then again you might appreciate the newer, faster hardware. But in my own real world usage, watching streamed video, checking web pages, playing simple games and using productivity apps, I can't notice any difference at all. None. Nada. Zilch.
So what else is different? Let's start with some specifications: Both iPads have the same size screen, and the same number of pixels. In fact, the screens are pretty much indistinguishable. But the newer iPad has a smaller bezel and in somewhat thinner. You wouldn't think so by looking at it but the older iPad is almost 1cm thick. The rounded edges are a brilliant visual/psychological trick used by product designers to make things look thinner. But if we ignore those for a moment (just to make the maths a bit easier), the iPad 4th Generation clocks in at 421 cubic centimetres. Do the same calculation for the newer iPad Air 2 and you get 248cc. So almost half the volume of the older model.
The new one is lighter too at 444g (the 437g in the image on this page is for the Wi-Fi only model), the older model is 662g. So where have the volume and weight savings been made? Well, some of it is obviously down to improved packaging. You can tell that from the relative density of the two models, 1.52 grams per cubic centimetre in the old model, 1.79 in the newer one. Perhaps some of the electronic components are a bit smaller too. But dig deeper into the specs and by far the biggest change is the battery.
Apple doesn't publish the battery capacity of its portable devices, but various third party websites such as ifixit.com pull the things to pieces (technically known as a 'teardown'), and they found that the 4th generation iPad contains a 3.7V 42.5Wh battery. It's actually this Wh (Watt hours) figure that's important when comparing batteries, as that's the totally power available. Confusingly, most batteries are advertised using Ah (Ampere hours, or more usually Amp hours) specifications. In this case, as we're working with simple DC, Volts times Amps equal Watts, so we get 11.48 Ah, which more marketing purposes is usually expressed as 11,480 mAh. Eleven thousand sounds better than eleven!
If we compare this with the iPad Air 2, the battery capacity has dropped from 42.5Wh to 27.62Wh. That's quite a drop, isn't it? In fact it didn't just drop like this – the intervening iPad Air (no 2) had a 32.9 Wh battery, making the reduction more gradual. So with every generation the thing has been getting smaller, allowing the tablet to get smaller, thinner, and lighter.
And yet for each of these models a shiny grey man has stood on a stage at a ‘keynote’ event in California and told us that the battery life hasn't been affected. "Still the same great ten hour battery life!" is the claim that's usually made, and if you've ever been to one of these events, or watched it streamed over the Internet, you'll know that the claim is always meet with an embarrassing cacophony of whoops and air-punching from the audience.
So do these claims stack up? Let's start with benchmarks. PC Pro uses a looping video test to measure battery life, as indeed do many other printed and online tech journals. It seems to be the standard way to do things. PC Pro of course does it better than most, by making sure that the screens are calibrated to exactly the same level of brightness, and setting the tablets to 'flight' mode. And in these benchmarks both iPads came within a gnat's whisker of each other, at between 12 and 13 hours. So maybe Apple's claims are true, then? Maybe they've somehow managed to optimize the hardware and software of the tablet to squeeze more performance from a smaller battery?
Well, obviously yes they have. If you are watching a looped video. But I have to tell you that in my real world usage the newer iPad lasts around 30% less time than the older one before needing a trip to the charger. And let’s not forget that the older one is, well, ‘older’. It has been recharged many times, so its battery has probably started to fade slightly. Yet it still has very much more stamina than the newer, lighter, smaller model.
I really don’t think anyone should be surprised by this. There is no magic that can make smaller batteries last longer than bigger ones. And if there’s optimisation available in software it’ll apply to older models as well as never ones as they both get OS updates.
As I said at the start, this really isn’t a rant directed at Apple, as all of the manufacturers do the same thing. The tech companies seem to think we want ever thinner devices (I’m not entirely convinced that we do), and as a result we see battery life suffering. I just wish they’d be more honest about it, rather than providing special optimisation to make sure that their new models with smaller batteries sail through typical benchmark tests without problems. I can’t help but be reminded of car emissions…
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