iPad has industry leading battery life of around 10 hour use on a full charge, but of course, this will vary based on what you’re using it for. Complex gaming apps like Call of Duty or Fortnite will certainly eat up your battery faster than email and web browsing for example. There are ways you can carefully sip away at that battery a bit more slowly through the day.
1: Switch off Background App Refresh
One of the services which iPad runs constantly in the background keeps your apps up to date, lets you know when there are notifications and uses your battery. Navigate to Settings > General > Background App Refresh and switch off any apps that you absolutely don’t need instant updates on to save them from accessing your data and battery behind the scenes.
2: Reduce Your Screen Brightness.
The backlight on your iPad’s display uses way more battery than you probably realise, so make sure that its either set to auto brightness so the system will optimise it or manually lower the brightness.
3: Airplane Mode.
If you can get away with it, for example if you’re just writing and don’t need to communicate with the world for a while, activating Airplane Mode will turn off all your wireless coms on the iPad. Of course, if you’re using a Bluetooth keyboard you’ll need that on still, but just be aware of how many wireless standards you’re making use of and turn them off when you can.
4: Dark Mode.
It may sound silly but Dark Mode will generally allow you to have the screen brightness lower while keeping text readable on the screen. While iPhones with the latest OLED screens will actively save power by using black screens that stops pixels being illuminated, iPad still uses a full backlight and LCD displays, so the gains here are much smaller.
5: Update iPad OS.
Apple constantly tweaks the operating system to help with power efficiency, so make sure you’re running the most recent version of iPadOS to take advantage of these. Although it may seem like your iPad doesn’t last as long as time goes by, its not because the operating system is draining the battery but that the battery itself degrades over time. Keeping your iPad up to date will mitigate this issue as much as possible, but eventually batteries will need to be replaced, but by then, its probably more economical to replace the device itself. Check out our article on making use of older iPads for some full time connected ideas for iPads with degraded batteries.
6: Top Up When You Can.
Not letting your battery completely empty is a good idea, and Apple’s battery tech is designed to notice when you normally pick up your iPad in the morning and optimise charging times to extend the useful life of the device. So plug in if you’re at the desk or just listening to music and don’t need it in your had all the time.
Living on iPad 