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
Precisely. I really don't think Anand's reviews are bad or invalid and I love the depth they go into, but there is a tendency to reflect lightly upon some of the more glaring annoyances involved with Apple products, especially when they regard the cost of upgrades.MarcSP - Wednesday, November 6, 2013 - link
Agree. Anadtech reviews are above anything else 99% of the time, but at the same time they still keep some weird bias and double standards that are hard to understand.BillBear - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
I just don't think this model air or the equivalent mini will prove to be very future proof when it comes to OS updates. Not updating the RAM along side such a large update to the CPU is going to make this device lack longevity in the same way the original iPad's 256k of RAM did.Also, it's really gotten to be time to start hammering Apple on just how ridiculous it is to still offer 16 Gigs of Flash as a baseline. Charging a hundred dollars to add an additional 16 Gigs is just ludicrous. Enterprise pricing indeed.
darkcrayon - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Granted, I would've like to have seen 2 GB, but look how long the iPad 2 lasted. It's from 2011 with 512 MB and they still sell it- and the mini with the same hardware came out in 2012 and they still sell that. Both are still actively being supported with new OS updates and new apps. I'm pretty sure the Air will be fine for at least 2-3 years even though its RAM wasn't increased.BillBear - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
The CPU and amount of RAM are going to be very obvious limiting factors when it comes to future updates. Why on earth go through such a quantum leap on one without simultaneously updating the other?This is a premium device. There is no reason to be so chintzy with updates that would cause such a minimal change in the cost of building the device.
You could kind of see it when the RAM was stacked on top of the CPU and there was limited room, but not now that they are using separate components.
solipsism - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
BillBeaer wrote, "Charging a hundred dollars to add an additional 16 Gigs is just ludicrous."What should they charge? $25? How does that make sense? How many people will then decide to pay $75 to go from 16GB to 128GB? I'd say nearly everyone which will then create an issue with selling the other models which then causes undue constraints on the 128GB versions and unsold product on the every so slightly models.
But this wouldn't happen because Apple figures out what is the ideal profit margin for the product category and then prices them which means they would /at least/ keep the 128GB at the price of $800 that it is now and then drop the prices by $25 for the others which means the 16GB model would cost $725. But, hey, you got you them to charge you *less* for a capacity increase¡
But that won't happen either because it alienates too many users if they were to start at $225 more than they currently do. Starting at below $500 opens the door for a lot more buyers.
So basically what you want is for Apple to make stupid business decisions that go against any rational business practices so you can pay less than what is asked. Nothing wrong with /wanting/ to pay less but your reasoning leaves something to be desired.
BillBear - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Have you priced a 16 Gig flash drive at retail lately? We're talking somewhere between ten and twenty bucks, depending on brand.Bare in mind that instead of just Apple's incremental cost of higher capacity Flash chips, those Flash drives must also include the cost of the Flash controller, USB interface, the device's case, retail packaging, and retail markup on top of all of that.
Anand is well justified in pointing out just how overpriced the one hundred dollar upgrade from 16 to 32 Gigs is.
solipsism - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
BillBear, completely ignoring the concept of economics, wrote, "Have you priced a 16 Gig flash drive at retail lately? We're talking somewhere between ten and twenty bucks, depending on brand."Fine, have it your way, let's do $10 stepping for doubling flash storage. Now the iPad Air is $769 for 16GB, $779 for 32GB, $789 for 64GB, and $799 for 128GB.
Do you really think it does you or Apple any favours to start at $769 instead of $499? Oh wait, you probably think 16GB is too lo
solipsism - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
… is too low for anyone and Apple should start with 32GB which means $779.Or are you saying all multiples of 16GB should cost the user $10, not a doubling? So now you get Now the iPad Air is $729 for 16GB, $739 for 32GB, $759 for 64GB, and $799 for 128GB. Do you really think it does you or Apple any favours to start at $729 instead of $499? I didn't think so.
Braumin - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Um, I think you forgot your meds this morning.If an iPad can cost $499 for 16GB, and we all know that another 16GB is going to be somewhere around a couple of dollars of cost, why would they have to start at $779?
Maybe you can think back to the days of the PC. My first PC cost $2000 and came with a 20GB hard drive. With your scar-o-nomics model, my PC that I have now with a 2TB drive should cost $2,000,000. In fact, I can now buy an entire PC with 1 very large hard drive for less than it cost to just buy the 20GB drive back then.
But I like your scar-o-nomics let's just ignore the fact that technology gets cheaper over time.