Apple Pencil 2 draining iPad Pro battery

Yes. Turn the pencil around so it’s not in the charging position. It works better with an iPad case with the pencil holder. That way the pencil doesn’t need to be magnetized to the iPad.

MichelPM, do a little research and post a viable solution or 🤫

If your iPad 11”/12.9” is going to remain powered on and idle for an extended amount of time with Pencil 2 magnetically attached, turn off Bluetooth or turn on Airplane mode - Pencil 2 will disconnect from your iPad (electronically not physically) and will not charge or consume iPad’s battery. Pencil 2 will remain dormant (or in sleep mode) when it doesn’t have an active Bluetooth connection - so even if you’re twirling it between your fingers, there’s no battery consumption.

Yes.

It will.

This is how the Apple Pencil is designed to always charge from the iPad.

The Pencil will constantly steal battery power from the iPad to keep the Apple Pencil always charged fully.

How else do you think the Apple Pencil always stays charged up.

The Apple Pencil is always going to use whatever amount of the the iPad’s battery power storage to charge itself.

This is exactly how Apple designed the Apple Pencil to work with the iPad/iPad Pro.

The iPad Pro and Apple Pencil are working just as designed.

The Apple pencil is working as designed and the only fix Apple could give would be to down regulate the charging of the Apple pencil during night hours or after an extended period of time.

The amount of battery drained from the iPad is significant and is likely due to the wireless charging as energy is lost in the process. Much less energy is lost in conventional charging as the wires used have a much lower resistance. I doubt Apple will fix this unless enough people cause a stir in forums like this or notably within the Apple community on youtube.

As far as fixes it is probably worth looking at cases like the Zugu Muse case which offers good protection, a place to hold your Apple pencil whilst charging and another elastic sleeve on the back of the iPad. This way overnight you can use the sleeve to hold the pencil.

Alternatively plug the iPad into a charger overnight as well.

I was having the exact same problem, luckily the 12.2 Beta 2 seems to have fixed the issue, now when I come back to my IPad after leaving it plugged in overnight the Apple Pencil 2 is fully charged instead of where it was before which was about 70%...

So. I updated to iOS 12.2 public beta 3. This has changed things. Now the overnight drops are in the region of maybe 3-5%, which is better. But I have noticed something interesting.

If I turn Bluetooth off completely, as has been pointed out by others, the drain does not occur. Pencil remains attached to the side of the iPad, and overnight there is 0-1% drain.

However, if the Pencil is at 100%, on charge, cool, to touch, no serious charging occurring, and I hit ‘forget this device’ in Bluetooth settings, the pencil begins getting very hot, as if it is charging, and the drain is maybe 10% over 6 hours.

So I wonder if at some point in the night, the iPad-Pencil Bluetooth connection drops, and the iPad respond to this by activating the charging coil.

I’ve found a little hack to fix the problem until apple releases an official fix. If you put a piece of aluminum foil on the pencil between the charging connector and the pencil itself, it will prevent the pencil from drawing any power from the iPad Pro. The advantage to this approach is that you can still utilize the magnetic storage system without your battery being needlessly drained. When you need to juice up just remove the aluminum barrier temporarily.

I believe this problem is fully resolved now from what I've observed on my 11" iPad Pro and Apple Pencil 2.

The original problem was my iPad Pro would drain like crazy with the Pencil attached--usually between the hours of 3 am and 6 am for some reason. Sometime during the night the Pencil would also start draining like crazy and I would wake up to it at 85% percent, not charging, but still attached to the iPad.

Two updates ago seemed to fix half the problem--the Pencil was now staying connected and topped off, but the iPad was draining anywhere from 15% to 25% a day with the Pencil attached. With it not attached, the iPad was draining a normal amount in standby (under 5%) overnight.

This week's iOS update seemed to have remedied both issues for me. Last night I put the iPad on my desk with the Pencil attached and went to bed--it was at 82% at the time. When I woke up this morning, it was at 80%, Pencil still attached and still topped off and connected.

Everyone that thinks that this is an issue/bug/defect should leave Apple feedback on this.

The only way to get Apple to, DIRECTLY, listen to you is to use their feedback portion of their website.

iPad Feedback

http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipad.html

Cognizant Apple employees read ALL feedback generated from all of the various feedback pages and transfers the data to the proper and responsible Apple teams and personnel , but NO Apple employees will ever respond with any type of direct, individual replies from the feedback you post.

The more users that post product feedback about any product issue, the faster Apple is made aware and starts working on a fix/solution for a future software update.

Also, you may want to phone contact Apple, directly in Cupertino, California, and calmly talk to an Apple customer service employee about this issue via the link below.

Contact - How to Contact Us - Apple

Good Luck to All of You!

@Daninabottle Since the latest iOS update last week, this issue is solved for me. I also had the draining pencil, but now it perfectly sticks to a 100% and has being doing this for the whole week. Did you already update?

I think people are kind of missing the point here. The iPad Pro has a nearly 37 Wh battery. The Pencil on the other hand has a 0.4 Wh battery.

We know that when disconnected from the iPad Pro, the Pencil battery drops by maybe 5-10% per day. Therefore, if attached to the iPad, why do we see such huge drops in iPad battery life, considering the standby power consumption of the pencil when detached from the iPad is so low?

In my case, the iPad battery drops 10% in 12h with the Pencil attached. This equates to 3-4 Wh of power. The equivalent of 10 full discharge-recharge cycles of the Pencil battery.

Clearly, there is something going badly wrong here. Moreover, if the Pencil really is drawing the equivalent of 10 cycles in a 12h period, this must be crucifying the battery and massively shortening its life.

As for the weird drops to 70% and lower, I too have had this happen, and I believe it is a special mode designed to protect the battery from overcharging when it has spent a lot of time up at ~100%. It’s almost like a hibernation mode for a pencil that hasn’t been used in a while. When my pencil goes into this mode, I do not get iPad battery drain. Perhaps they could make this mode initiate sooner. Either way though, the amount the pencil is drawing when attached is so high that it simply must be a bug or a flaw. The pencil should be drawing only the same amount it would need to compensate for what it loses when deattached from the iPad, which is about 5-10% per 24h period.

I too have submitted a bug report. I just hope they take note.

I literally cannot believe Apple.

On 12.1.4 they pushed the x60 firmware update to the Pencil. This totally fixed the problem.

Upon updating to 12.2, the firmware is still x60. But now the insidious ~10% per 24h drain has returned.

Can anyone else confirm what kind of standby drain they get per 24h? I am pretty much solidly on 10% now.

On 12.1.4 with the new Pencil firmware this drain was only 3-5% per 24h.

Get it together Apple!

Background tasks will always account for some battery usage whilst the iPad is idle - and the background activity will be heavily influenced by your individual setup of Apps, notifications, email configuration (such number of accounts, push/fetch intervals) etc. An attached Apple Pencil will also increase consumption.

On average, 10% battery depletion per day for an idle iPad is likely a reasonable expectation.

I could totally accept this. If detaching the pencil didn’t turn a 10% drain into a 2% drain.

The pencil has a tiny battery. And if detached loses 5-10% of its battery in 24h standby. There is no reason why it should need to draw 8% of the iPad Pro’s battery just to top up that tiny battery by 5-10%.

I’m having the exact same issue. Before I had the Apple Pencil I didnt have the over night drain issue. I’m going to start doing the slide the pencil off the charger at night for now. Hopefully and update can fix this.