The iPad Air Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 29, 2013 9:00 PM ESTBattery Life
With the iPad Air Apple moved to a 32.4Wh battery, a significant decrease from the 42.5Wh unit in the 3rd and 4th generation iPads. The smaller battery doesn’t come with a change to Apple’s claim of 10 hours of battery life, which implies a reduction in overall platform power. I confirmed a substantial reduction in platform power in my crude measurements earlier in the article. Although it’s possible for the iPad Air to draw substantially more power than the iPad 4, our earlier power data seems to imply that it’s unlikely given the same exact workload. Our battery life tests agree.
We'll start with our 2013 smartphone/tablet web browsing battery life test. As always all displays are calibrated to 200 nits. The workload itself is hidden from OEMs to avoid any intentional gaming, but I've described it at a high level here.
Our web browsing workload came in at exactly 10 hours of continuous usage - an improvement compared to the iPad 4. Battery life on LTE was good as well, consistently delivering just under 10 hours of usage. The fact that both LTE and WiFi tests deliver similar results tells me that we may be bottlenecked by some other component in the system (perhaps display?).
I've been running the same video playback test for a while now, although we're quickly approaching a point where I'll need to move to a higher bitrate 1080p test. Here I'm playing a 4Mbps H.264 High Profile 720p rip I made of the Harry Potter 8 Blu-ray. The full movie plays through and is looped until the battery dies. Once again, the displays are calibrated to 200 nits:
Video playback battery life also improves slightly compared to the iPad 4. Apple’s battery life claims aren’t usually based around video playback, so exceeding their 10 hour suggestion here shouldn’t come as a shock. Apple’s video decode power has always been extremely low.
Our final cross-platform battery life test is based on Kishonti's Egypt HD test. Here we have a loop of the Egypt HD benchmark, capped to 30 fps, running on all of the devices with their screens calibrated to 200 nits.
Our 3D battery life rundown test shows a substantial improvement in battery life over the iPad 4. IMG’s PowerVR G6430, running a moderate workload, can do so more efficiently than any of the previous generation GPUs in Apple’s SoCs. Much like the A7’s CPU cores however, there’s a wider dynamic range of power consumption with the G6430. Running at max performance I would expect to see greater GPU power consumption. The question then becomes what’s more likely? Since the majority of iOS games don’t target the A7 (and instead shoot for lower end hardware), I would expect you to see better battery life even while gaming on the iPad Air vs the iPad 3/4.
Charge Time
The iPad Air comes with the same 12W USB charger and Lightning cable that we first saw with the iPad 4. Having to only charge a 32.5W battery means that charge times are lower compared to the iPad 3 and 4:
A full charge takes a little over 4 hours to complete. The adapter delivers as much as 12W to the iPad, drawing a maximum of 13.5W at the wall. I still think the sweet spot is somewhere closer to 2.5 hours but that’s another balancing game that must be played between charge time and maintaining battery health. It’s still so much better than the ~6 hours of charge time for the iPad 3 and 5.69 hours for the iPad 4.
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Spunjji - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
No, we can't all agree that. Because it's not.You're also confusing "letterboxing" with "massive loss of picture size". Because yes, you get letterboxing on 21:9 (not the majority) content with a 16:9 display. But the absolutely vast quantity of space lost on a 4:3 tablet means you are getting something closer to a 7" diagonal. So why bother carrying a 10" tablet?
Also, since when was constant width an automatic plus?
Feel free to trot out lots of other personal preferences like they're a logical argument, but they genuinely are not.
MarcSP - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
I think your posts is one of the most sensible and well informed around. I was going to say more or less the same you said, but you already did a superb job in explaining that iPad, as good as it is, is not the golden standard or the perfect machine all other tablets must be measured to.It seems that for some people the thinking is "if tablet X =!= iPad, then it is shit, because iPad represents perfection". But, "if tablet X = iPad, then it is an immoral copycat". :-P
+100 for you!
YuLeven - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
Thank you, Marcs.I don't have anything against Apple or its iPad. I even owned one and although it is a good loonking, great tablet, it failed me when I tried to do a lil' more than killing some free time.
When people justify that tablets don't need all the stuff that Google and Microsoft are bringing through their systems, they're basically saying that if the iPad don't do such, than it's not really a tablet function.
So this is it. I'm not on the market for a tablet anymore, i'm on the market for this 'terrible, horrendous mashup of netbook and tablet' that feel great for having fun and working.
Spunjji - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
Agreed. The fact that all of the people who've been descending upon any /remotely/ critical post flocked right to it to say how wrong he was provides an amusing measure of the post's quality. :)hlovatt - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Great review in incredible detail. The review rarely offers an opinion, it measures performance and ranks the results.Can't understand all the negative comments, I guess people have bought other devices and are now trying to justify that choice - as much to themselves as anyone else.
I don't know how Anand and the other reviewers feel, they are working incredibly hard to get such a detailed review out so quickly and then people make wild unsubstantiated comments and general slurs on their character. If I was them I would feel pretty slighted.
Anyway, just wanted to say how much I appreciated their hard work and to suggest that if you really think the reviews are biased you would be better off reading less objective reviews that pander to your biases.
Spunjji - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Here's an example:"An interesting side effect of Apple’s pricing structure is that the cost for NAND upgrades actually gets pretty reasonable at the higher capacities."
Here's another way of putting it:
Apple are still charging the same amount for a 16GB to 32GB upgrade while the flash inside the devices has halved in price twice since the iPad 1 was released. $300 is well above the value of an extra 112GB of eMMC NAND flash in 2013.
But hey, whatever floats your boat. Focus on the positives..?
Braumin - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Good point. I won't slam Anand too much on this review because overall I thought it was pretty good, but this sentence is for sure a joke."actually gets pretty reasonable at the higher capacities"
No, it doesn't. Unless you ignore the fact that you were just raped on the first 48 GB.
And another thing that's a joke is the LTE version costs $130 more. For a $5 antennae.
I mean I know they need to keep their margins, and that's fine for shareholders, but it needs to be pointed out in a review that both the LTE and NAND are completely gouging you.
MarcSP - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Sadly, Apple is not alone in this absurd practice. Surface does the same, although at least its base model has 32 GB (up to 21 free with full Office installed) for 50$ less than iPad 16 (about 14 GB free without any extra apps).And then we have to realize that it is 100$ for 32 GB more (32-->64GB model), not 100$ for 16 more like the iPad (16-->32), so it's half the cost actually.
Still, Anandtech said Surface is too expensive and should give you free acesories. :-/
MarcSP - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Of course, I also would prefer Surface to be free, to give away all the accesories and to include a troup of dancing girls :-PSpunjji - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
Yes, there's a very odd set of different standards being applied there. The thing is, I don't disagree with the overall tone and conclusions of either review. It just annoys me when I see weird double-standards like that in the copy.