iPad pro 9.7 battery

Latest findings:

Bluetooth on and no devices available or selected, battery sleep mode drain rate @ 1% per hr

Bluetooth on and Apple Pencil connected, battery sleep mode drain rate, between 1.5% and 2% per hr

Bluetooth off, battery sleep mode drain rate 0%

Can someone else please confirm this? I have returned my iPad to Apple already. The bluetooth on my iPad was always on and Apple pencil paired and next to it at all times.

It's hard to know if your battery usage is normal or not. But you should check the Battery Usage in the Settings app to learn just what app or processes are using your battery.

Settings > Battery > Wait for the Battery Usage to Populate

You will get a list of apps that are using the battery with a percentage of battery usage for each app.

Star Wars Force Awakens (auto brightness on/volume at 3) 2.18 burned around 20% which equates to 11.30 of video time on a full charge.

It appears 3D games/screen at full brightness/volume at full level eats battery life.

Any form of background task inevitably use the battery, notifications for instance, you may want to turn these off.

As Ralph mentions the battery panel under settings gives lots of information including time for usage since last charge and standby time since last charge.

HI, I have the same problem with my iPad Pro 9.7. But, I noticed that Safari drains the battery. For example, if I kill it, during the night the iPad consumes about 4%. If I leave Safari in background I lost 15/20% of battery life. It seems to be a bug. Hope it can help.

I turned off Bluetooth and it seems to make a huge difference with consumption of 3.4% overnight. I think there is a problem with either the iOS version but more likely the iPad Pro 9.7 as when I use my similarly configured iPad Air with Bluetooth on, the drain overnight is minimal.

If there's a hardware problem with the iPad Pro which effects battery life are Apple going to admith to it? I doubt it.

All of the tests I ran showed battery life was acceptable which discounts a hardware problem.

The newer screen technology in the smaller iPad Pro may consume more battery life.

Not sure where you keep your screen brightness at, the less bright the screen is, the better the battery life.

You can improve screen readability at lower brightness by adjusting the contrast and white balance of the screen, changing the default iOS font size and to bold text

Editing apps for notifications and location services can help battery life, too!

Editing Spotlight searches to those apps that spotlight can truly search will, also, help with performance and battery life.

Setting mail to fetch at longer intervals or to manually fetch mail when you launch the mail app will conserve battery life.

Turning off all of the iOS motion graphics eye candy will preserve battery life and speed up performance.

Same goes for turning off background application refreshing in the background.

All of these things can improve iOS performance on any iDevice and preserve battery life.

I can confirm this. While Apple Pencil paired (not always even connected) battery draining was excessive. I noticed this since originally without the Pencil the consumption was at the same level with my iPad Air. However just BT on with no devices paired my consumption rate overnight, sleep mode of course, was very reasonable. Therefore I would point this to the Apple Pencil.

Turning Bluetooth off has of course the same effect however then also handoff etc. stops working.

I could not agree more. Turning off Bluetooth made all the difference and I think now my iPad Pro 9.7 gets comparable battery life to my iPad Air. I bought the Apple Pencil because it was cool and thought it would be fun. Right now, I don't see much use for it and it is a real dog as far as the battery life issue even when not paired. It is a shame to have to turn on Bluetooth when one needs it but the battery life is much more dependable. Neither my iPad Air nor my iPhone 6s are affected by Bluetooth. I hope Apple will come up with a fix for this.

PDB Milwaukee wrote:

I could not agree more. Turning off Bluetooth made all the difference and I think now my iPad Pro 9.7 gets comparable battery life to my iPad Air. I bought the Apple Pencil because it was cool and thought it would be fun. Right now, I don't see much use for it and it is a real dog as far as the battery life issue even when not paired. It is a shame to have to turn on Bluetooth when one needs it but the battery life is much more dependable. Neither my iPad Air nor my iPhone 6s are affected by Bluetooth. I hope Apple will come up with a fix for this.

I'm not seeing this. I have BT on all the time and battery life is comparable to my iPad Air.

I really like the Pencil. In fact, it's why I finally broke down and bought the iPad Pro 9.7 (the iPad Pro was too big). I take lots of handwritten notes at meetings when using the keyboard would be too obtrusive.

Raises an interesting point. However, even with the Apple Pencil not paired but Bluetooth on, the battery life was terrible. I unpaired the Apple Pencil and turned off Bluetooth and now battery life acceptable.

I thought maybe I was nuts as I've been seeing huge drains overnight compared to my Air 1st Gen. I checked last night before bed and it was at 17%, this morning 1%.

A few comments on what I've read:

I have both iPad Pros and the 12.9 inch has no issues with the pencil connected at all times, so I'm not convinced it's the pencil. I'd think if it was I'd see the same issue on the 12.9 inch and that seems to hold it's battery fine.

Has anyone tried turning off True Tone? I realize that "shouldn't" do anything while the screen is off but I'm a fan of shutting everything off and then adding things back to see what breaks.

Turning off Bluetooth was the only thing that would allow battery life similar to iPad Air (1st generation.) Even unpairing the Apple Pencil did not work for me.

I've been using pencil once in a while and always unpaired the device after use. First it seemed that it helped however not anymore. Now after switching the ipad off and then on with Bluetooth on simultaneously full 100% charge has lasted for the whole day (mostly in sleep mode). Could it be one of the processes connected with Bluetooth and pencil that keeps the system busy?