Well sure, the fact remains I wasn't able to finish that one movie before the battery ran out. I absolutely understand that big bright displays are the number one battery killer in any mobile device, I do. But I can't pretend it's that great of a mobile device if the battery can't last for a movie, no matter what the reason might be.
Agreed. I mentioned this on my other reply to you, but tests have shown that new iPads are worse on their original iOS versions with heavy, high brightness use when compared to early iPad Pros.
4 hours would be nearly double what I get on the Air 5, that would be pretty good and more in line of what I'd expect. But I mean it's fine to me, I wanted that extra mobile 11" tablet form factor and I knew battery life wouldn't be fantastic. It's a great iPad really, as I said I prefer the extra M1 performance over battery life.
You are not wrong in expecting that. iPads have always been able to deliver that. It can’t do that now because Apple forced it to iOS 12, but I played Minecraft once, many years ago (an extremely heavy game), in broad daylight with my 9.7-inch iPad Pro on iOS 9 and it dropped from 100% to 70% within 2 hours. That’s insanely good, and my Air 5 probably wouldn’t be able to reach those numbers.
That is insanely long but perhaps you are using it on relatively low brightness? Mine's still at least 50%. That is really the minimum for me to see well in a bright room during the day.
I am using it at very low brightness, yes. It’s impossible to get to those numbers at higher brightness. 50% is way too high for that.
Mainly what I do is multitasking with stage manager and I am on Wifi only with nothing external connected. I like switching between half a dozen apps a lot. So I rely on the M1 and the 8GiB to keep all apps in memory and not close/reload anything ever. I suspect that is what reduces my battery runtime. I have two browsers open with about two dozen tabs with one Safari tab usually playing content in PiP mode, speakers on low volume. Sometimes I play back high quality H.264 camera footage with VLC in between. That's about all it takes to deplete the battery in roughly 2 hours. Apps like Music, Mail, Notes and so on are always open in Stage Manager in the background.
And your usage is far heavier. I don’t have Stage Manager as I am on iPadOS 15 (frankly, even if I blame iOS updates all the time, I doubt the first major update is too significant), and speakers are extremely draining. Two browsers, Stage Manager, speakers, PIP, high quality camera usage. That’s very heavy. I reckon your can’t expect much. Obviously, my 9.7-inch iPad Pro can’t do that, but I reckon it may only be moderately better (if better at all) on iOS 12 with the closest approximation to that usage that I could muster.
I don’t think your device is bad, I think your usage is way too heavy to expect good battery life.
I don't think it's very heavy usage, I do not do any processing/transcoding at all, I mostly rely on the big memory, I don't care about the M1 performance much otherwise. I am sure the Apple estimated 10 hours at half brightness at extremely light workloads like reading a book and playing music in the background is realistic, but I wouldn't say my usage is very heavy. Very heavy for me would be my multi tasking but additionally editing videos as well, anything that is CPU intense. And I don't have anything that takes up a lot of CPU resources.
I think that while no individual activity is heavy, all of that together is. The battery isn’t large enough, and the M1 is too powerful for the “small” battery on the Air 5 to cope.
I am hoping the Air 5 will age better due to M1. The abundance of memory for example means it will be many years before iPadOS needs to start closing apps, preserving app state, reloading that...
I replied to the longevity aspect on the other thread.
In the end, the Air with a tiny 60W "GaN" quickcharger is incredibly powerful with a very small footprint in my backpack, so I'll take that on the go over my 14" MBP any day.
And this is the most important aspect. You can change it can extremely quickly, so at the end of the day, enjoy it, use it for everything you want and need it to, and charge it.
My recommendation is controversial and unpopular, but if your use case allows, keep it on iPadOS 16. You won’t see any battery life degradation even if the battery degraded (this is if you are planning to keep it long-term), and it will last for a very, very long time.
My 9.7-inch iPad Pro was forced in August 2019 from iOS 9 to iOS 12 (by Apple’s A9 activation bug on iOS 9), and it saw an immediate 20-25% decrease in screen-on time (from 13-14 hours of light use to 10-11), but it has seen no degradation since. I can extrapolate that if it were on iOS 9, it would be perfect, like-new, even if it is 7 years old. The battery life has been exactly the same throughout that device’s entire stay on iOS 9 (2016-2019), it saw the immediately degradation I mentioned after iOS 12, and it has remained exactly the same since (2019-2023), which allows me to conclude that excluding the iOS 12-induced degradation, it has seen no decrease in battery life even after 7 years of use.