The new iPad isn’t just faster than ever, it has four times as many pixels, a power-hungry new mobile broadband technology, twice the RAM, and more.
All of these things add up to the new iPad being the best iPad yet, but it comes at a cost: they’re all more battery hungry than their predecessors. How, then, did Apple manage to get 10 hours of battery life — the same as before — out of the new iPad, while keeping it roughly the same weight and thickness?
Easy… and by easy, we mean “insanely difficult.” They increased the battery capacity by 70%… then densely packed it to fit the iPad 3’s case.
According to ZDNet, the new iPad’s battery is a massive 11,666mAh, compared to the iPad 2’s 6994mAH. And considering the fact that the iPad 2 was almost all battery anyway, the only way they could fit that much battery into the device is by quietly revolutionizing battery density.
All this points to something very significant. It suggests that Apple has managed to increase significantly the power density of the Li-ion cells that it uses. In an industry that has seemed stagnant for some time now, this is quite an achievement and goes to show that Apple’s battery research labs and manufacturing plants have been hard at work. There’s no doubt that we’re going to be seeing the fruits of this labor in other Apple products soon.
That means that Apple’s work in battery density is not only going to open the door to an LTE iPhone 5, but could give us all-day MacBooks sooner rather than later.
Incredible. The only question I have is what this will end up meaning for charging. Will charging the iPad LTE take almost twice as long, or has Apple figured something out there too?
