iOS 6 battery life terrible

My iPad 3 has not been plugged in since last night just before bedtime about 12 hours ago. This morning I have been streaming HD video podcasts using Downcast as well as sending the audio to a Bluetooth speaker for the past 3 hours. Yet my battery level is at 81%.

I don't dispute the fact there is a battery issue, but it is still working well for a lot of people in their setups too.

Well, in my opinion the battery life with iOS 6 is now much better!

1 % left and I have 8 hrs and 17 minutes usage and 1 day 7 hrs standby time. (I browsed the web, sent some E-Mails with pictures & received some text E-Mails, made some calls, used iMessage, Siri, Facebook, iCal, Contacts and other apps like Dropbox. Also I have 2 E-Mail accounts on "Push" and iCloud activated with all its features, except iCloud Mail and iTunes Match!)

With iOS 5.1.1 I hardly reached 6 hrs usage time.

Yup... I came across this thread searching about the same thing. My iPad battery drained quick today and knew it had to be related to the update.

yes, truly, truly horrible.

Charged overnight to 100%, unplugged from charger, and dropped to 97% immediately.

Can I go back to ios5 ? the maps are unusable, and I would just like to forget it, as Siri is not worth this.

I am stunned they would release something this bad. They should have just dropped maps completely rather than let someone's high schooler do it.

Lack of Jobs apparently has left them leader and clueless.

Have to agree with Stema001. Best update I have seen yet. Battery is a lot better than iOS 5.1.1 on iPhone 4s. This is the same old story with every update major or minor. Some folks have issues upgrading their devices and results in poor battery. Typically its caused by a bad update of the settings or older apps not compatible with the newer iOS fully. The fix that seems to help the most folks is to "reset all settings", setup as new when the device reboots. This does not erase your apps or data and when it completes all your apps are back. Usually a total battery drain until the device cuts off then a full charge back up (past 100% maybe 1.5 to 2 hrs) after the reset process will further enhance the battery performance.

I simply performed OTA and its been the best it ever has been. Mine came with iOS 5.0 in Nov 2011 and went through all the updates since then. So far iOS 6 is a well worth upgrade and no one I personally know have had any issues. Most all on Verizon (CDMA) versions. Luck to those of you that are having issues. I suspect its a setup problem and not iOS 6 itself necessarily.

No problems with my battery life after upgrading to ios6. I purposely used it a lot today.

I purposely ran my iPad hard today. It was taken off the charger last night around 10 PM when I did a little light web browsing before bedtime. I woke up around 8 AM streaming some video podcasts also using a bluetooth speaker. Once the podcasts were done I fired up the TWITpad app and let it stream their live internet video feed along with the IRC chat running till the battery died still using the bluetooth speaker. It finally gave out at 7:30 PM. That was over 20 hours since it was on a charger with over 11 hours of streaming video while playing audio on a bluetooth speaker. iOS 6 is capable of a good battery life.

I think we will all have varying experiences simply because we all have our devices configured differently, many different apps, and our behavior is simply diverse.

I tried resetting all settings on my iPhone 4 with iOS 6 and with the device in sleep mode and no apps running after the reset, my batteries dropped 12% in 40 minutes. It's actually worse.

My hope is a point release will come out soon because I have no desire to upgrade my "new" iPad without some conclusion to my iPhone 4/iOS 6 setup.

Was hoping the reset was going to work....oh yea, it seems to be running hotter than usual too.

Just to add to this, yep mine is terrible too. I have an iPhone 4 and this is exactly like when IOS 5 came out.

I have turned the phone on at 7:30 this morning with 100% battery life and now it's down to 80% at 0900.

Rubbish. At this rate it is not going to last all day, and this is just sending two emails and playing one song on iTunes.

i restored without backup my iphone 4s and now it works great!! battery issue solved!!!

I have ain iPad 2 anda after the iOS 6 may batteries have been drained very, very fast. Update it now, Apple!

So for those of us that do seem to have a battery issue, does everyone agree it seems to be related to browsing the web with Safari? A lot of the comments seem to note that the battery drains quickly while browsing the web.

I'm thinking its a bug in the new iCloud Tabs feature.

I'd just note that if it is Safari, it might not be Safari in general. What I mean by that is that it may also have to do specifically with the type of sites we browse. It's possible that Safari doesn't handle html5 video or javascript processing as effeciently as before... or something along those lines. So some people may not notice the issue depending on what type of sites they browse.

No, not at all. It would be great if it was that simple. I hardly use Safari on my iphone and after resetting settings the other day, nothing was running and it drained consistently at 10% / hour.

Today by 1pm the batteries drained completely and my phone shutoff....basically, this is the first time any Apple product has been rendered useless --- extremely disappointing and as usual, not a word from Apple...it's getting a little annoying and they better start paying attention to their customers...at least acknowledge it, please!

I don't agree that this is normal upon every release. My phone was just fine before I upgraded. I've been in the Software Engineering biz for 30+ yrs, this is a problem with the latest code base, period.

I'm seeing something similar with my Verizon iPhone 4. First time I charged it after the iOS 6 "upgrade", it went from 60% to 0 in about 3 hrs. I quit all apps (I know this probably doesn't make a difference, but I did it anyway), shut it down and restarted, and it is better. However, battery life is still far less than it used to be. In light usage (some web browsing, checking email, and a phone call or 2), charge drops to ~50% in a day. Not really acceptable.