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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errorr - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Kraken isn't as bad a some others. I'm convinced Anand includes sunspider for laughs more than anything.thunng8 - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
I have doubts that Javascript benchmarks have a tilt on the A7.Safari's javascript engine is the weakest of the 3 major ones available on OS X Mavericks. I did a few benchmarks on my MacBook Pro 2.2Ghz Quad i7 (2011):
Chrome 30, Firefox 24, Safari 7
Sunspider 1.01 163, 169, 163
Lower is better .. they are about equivalent
Kraken 1.1 1471, 1692, 2212
Lower is better .. Chrome is about 50% faster than Safari in Kraken
Octane 1.0 19250, 15488, 14801
Higher is better.. Chroms is ~30% better than Safari
As iOs7 uses the same Javascript engine as Mavericks, Safari's engine is mediocre at best.
darkich - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Also, about the power consumption, Anand's notion about it probably being higher than that of the A6X is just horrendous - it is definitely clear that the A7 is much easier on battery than the A6X.Apple themeselves stated that the decrease in the iPad Air's battery size was possible because of the A7's power efficiency, Anand!
evilspoons - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
It IS higher - when it is stressed to the maximum. It is capable of dissipating more power, period.However, because of the concept of race-to-idle, it finishes tasks faster and can go into a low-power state faster than the A6X, therefore using less power on average, resulting in longer battery life for a given battery capacity.
solipsism - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
There also seems to be power savings with the display components. I wonder if IGZO is /finally/ utilized; although I would have expected Apple to dropped this buzz-word if they had finally incorporated that process.evilspoons - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Thank you for the comprehensive, high-quality review. Great job.I won't be buying an iPad Air as the value-per-dollar of the Nexus 7 is just too tempting for me, but I can safely recommend it to friends and family if they're interested. Looks like Apple did a really good job this time around.
jwdav - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Per square inch of screen, the Nexus 7 is 35% more expensive than the iPad:Apple’s iPad mini has a 7.9-inch display boasting 29.96 sq. inches of display area. That is 36% larger than Google’s plastic Nexus 7′s tiny 7-inch display’s 22.02 sq. inches. Google’s Nexus 7 offers a display that’s just 64% of Apple’s iPad mini. 64% of Apple’s $299 iPad mini price is $191.36, not $230.
So, why is Google’s tiny-screen Nexus 7 priced so high?
Braumin - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
$299 mini - junk internals with an old 1024x768 screen$229 Nexus 7 - 1920x1200 screen, new internals.
What you meant to do was compare it to the mini retina, which is $399. Using your "logic" then the Nexus 7 should be $255, but it's not it's only $229. It gets real ugly after that if you try to compare the 32GB SKUs so don't.
I'm not a Nexus fan by any means but you look to be doing self-justification. That's a real thing check it out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-justification
MarkWebb - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
I think the iPad Air is mind-blowing. It's the tiny microPad, the Touch, that I feel sorry for, chugging along on an A5....tipoo - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
I so want an A7 touch.