For those who gets the Air 5 today can you please report what the actual battery life is with it?
Is it better than Air 4 which according to most reviews was the worst between it and the 11 pro, mini 6 and regular iPad 9.
I have a M1 MBP and I love it which has unbelievable battery life, easy get 17 hours of light use on one charge!

Thanks

nph said:

For those who gets the Air 5 today can you please report what the actual battery life is with it?
Is it better than Air 4 which according to most reviews was the worst between it and the 11 pro, mini 6 and regular iPad 9.
I have a M1 MBP and I love it which has unbelievable battery life, easy get 17 hours of light use on one charge!

I expect majority of Air 4 owners aren't upgrading yet to the Air 5. Might be better off waiting for YouTube reviews.

That said, the MBP has almost double the battery size (58.8Wh vs Air 5 30.8Wh) so don't expect to get similar battery life as the MBP.

I'm in a situation where my iPad Air 4 is only 3 weeks old and I can exchange it for an Air 5, and the only difference between the two that would matter to me is battery life. I decided to stick with my Air 4 because it's battery is definitely better. Some datapoints: "On the Tom's Guide Battery Test, which involves surfing the web over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of screen brightness, the new iPad Air lasted 10 hours and 9 minutes. That's excellent endurance and a bit longer than Apple's claimed 10 hours. The previous iPad Air 4 lasted a slightly longer 10 hours and 29 minutes."

So that's 3% better battery life, an extra 20 minutes. "....but the Air 5 lasted a long time while watching movies. I looped a downloaded movie in the Apple TV app for four hours and the battery only dropped to 75 percent."

So I was really happy to have found this, last night I downloaded a movie on Apple TV app, charged up to 100%, and ran it for exactly 4 hours and the iPad Air 4 dropped to 83%. So that's a betterment of 8%.

Lastly, last week I ran another test of my own, trying to compare to my old Air 2. Starting with the Air 4 battery already run down to 58%, with backlight at 30%, volume at 30%, in airplane mode, running a downloaded video on Disney+ the whole time, I got 10 hours of playback before the Air 4 died. Figuring it would have lasted around 17 hours had I started at 100%.

This all makes sense as it is consistent with A14 vs. M1 prior battery tests where ever time Apple comes out with a new and all-powerful chip it makes a small, but noticeable, difference to battery life.

It's interesting to note that the Air 5 has slightly shorter battery life than the Air 4 when the M1 Pro 11 lasted 13+ hours on Tom's web browsing test.

I guess the ProMotion display likely helps a lot with power saving techniques (e.g. lower refresh rate on static content).

Mine hasn't arrived yet but I can tell you it is going to be at least 400% better than my iPad Pro 10.5 at this point.

3% ... 20 minutes... , over the course of > 10 hours? 🥱

I'm not a statistician (I'm sure there is one among us that can set me straight), but I seriously doubt that 20 minutes over the course of 10+ hours is statistically significant, and if the test is performed multiple times, the opposite result may be seen just as often.

Personally, the added upgrades more than make up for a 3% battery loss (at the same cost) IMHO. I would rather have current tech, then tech that is approaching 2 years old now for a 3% battery bump ... maybe that's just me.

ufgatorvet said:

Personally, the added upgrades more than make up for a 3% battery loss (at the same cost) IMHO. I would rather have current tech, then tech that is approaching 2 years old now for a 3% battery bump ... maybe that's just me.

Technically, M1 and A14 are both 2 year old tech. It's just that one is 8-core CPU/8-core GPU/8GB while the other is 6-core CPU/4-core GPU/4GB.

The A14 would perform similar to M1 in most tasks barring gaming, video editing, etc. It's really just the RAM amount that's subpar.

rui no onna said:

Technically, M1 and A14 are both 2 year old tech. It's just that one is 8-core CPU/8-core GPU/8GB while the other is 6-core CPU/4-core GPU/4GB.

The A14 would perform similar to M1 in most tasks barring gaming, video editing, etc. It's really just the RAM amount that's subpar.

I gotcha.

ufgatorvet said:

3% ... 20 minutes... , over the course of > 10 hours? 🥱

Some of us value battery life over milliseconds of supposedly superior 'performance'. What's 60% of a millisecond? I'll take the 3% of 10 hours, thanks.

ufgatorvet said:

I'm not a statistician

Doesn't take one.

ufgatorvet said:

Personally, the added upgrades more than make up for a 3% battery loss (at the same cost) IMHO. I would rather have current tech, then tech that is approaching 2 years old now for a 3% battery bump ... maybe that's just me.

That's fine. Some of us don't FaceTime from a tablet or need a darker shade of blue. Some of us use an iPad to read news and watch movies, that's it. So any reduction in battery life is unacceptable.

rui no onna said:

Technically, M1 and A14 are both 2 year old tech. It's just that one is 8-core CPU/8-core GPU/8GB while the other is 6-core CPU/4-core GPU/4GB.

Technically they are not 2 years old.

The A14 was introduced 549 days ago and the M1 was introduced 493 days ago. Neither is close to the 730 days in 2 years. The A14 was about 18 months and the M1 was about 16 months ago.

rui no onna said:

It's interesting to note that the Air 5 has slightly shorter battery life than the Air 4 when the M1 Pro 11 lasted 13+ hours on Tom's web browsing test.

I guess the ProMotion display likely helps a lot with power saving techniques (e.g. lower refresh rate on static content).

But did they redo the same test on both tablet with the same IOS version? they probably did the Air 4 test awhile back around 2020 and just reused those numbers to compare with the ipad Air 5 that is using the current ipadOS. The new ipadOS does seem to drain faster.

I traded in my wife’s Air 3 for an Air 5, her complaint was the battery life wasn’t as long as her Air 3. I told her give it a week for all the indexing to wrap up, hopefully that’s the case and not a bum battery

Will say though, I did not restore as “new” but restored from backup. Perhaps if the problem isn’t getting better I can convince to start from scratch