Keep your iPad Air running longer on a single charge with these battery-saving tips.
Apple’s iPad Air lineup is known for its battery life. They tend to offer excellent battery life, with all models promising 10 hours of usage as per Apple. However, there are a lot of terms and conditions attached here, and if you are looking to extend the battery life of your iPad Air, follow this guide.
As a user, you can tweak some of the settings in iPadOS to get maximum juice out of your iPad Air battery. In this post, we will talk about the best battery saving tips and tricks to extend the endurance time of your iPad Air.
The battery saving tips explained in this article apply to the following iPad Air Models:
- Fifth Generation: 10.9-inch iPad Air released in 2022.
- Fourth Generation: 10.9-inch iPad Air released in 2020.
- Third Generation: 10.5-inch iPad Air released in 2019.
- Second Generation: 9.7-inch iPad Air 2 released in 2014.
Improve iPad Air Battery Life With These Tips and Tricks
1. Reduce screen brightness
It may seem convenient to have your brightness on max, especially when you’re outside, but this can cause your iPad Air battery to drain faster. Turning the brightness down on your iPad Air can certainly help when it comes to extending the battery life.
To adjust screen brightness on your iPad, swipe up to open the Control Center and use the slider on the right to lower your screen brightness. You can also go to Settings > Display & Brightness to adjust the brightness. Also on this settings page is a toggle switch for Auto-Brightness. Unless you are frequently using your iPad Air at the beach or in other brightly lit environments, turn on Auto-Brightness, which adjusts the screen level based on ambient light.
2. Turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth when not in use
It might seem like a no-brainer to keep your Wi-Fi or data activated at all hours so that you can keep connected day and night. But this can significantly drain your iPad Air battery, as you constantly get notifications, background updates, and more when you don’t necessarily need them.
A Wi-Fi connection consumes less energy than a cellular connection, so use it when you can. But Wi-Fi consumes power, even if you are not using it to connect to a network, so you should consider turning it off when you are not online. During your sleeping hours is a great time to switch off your Wi-Fi.
Similarly, while using your iPad Air, you might have connected your headphones, keyboard or speakers to it using Bluetooth. Most users forget to turn off the option after completing the work. Unnecessarily keeping your Bluetooth on can impact the battery life on the iPad Air. Consider switching it off when you aren’t using it to conserve battery.
Both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi can be also toggled on and off by swiping up from the bottom edge of your iPad Air’s screen for the Control Center.
3. Turn off AirDrop
AirDrop is a feature that lets you shuttle files among your iOS devices or between your iPhone or iPad Air and your Mac. It’s super simple to use but, like fellow wireless technologies Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, it can also drain your battery even when you aren’t transferring files. Unless you are using AirDrop to transfer files regularly, why not keep it turned off until you need to use it? To do so, swipe up for the Control Center, tap AirDrop and then tap Receiving Off.
4. Turn off Handoff
I don’t need to answer phone calls on my iPad Air and I rarely use it to finish an email or text I started on my iPhone or Mac (or vice versa). Because I use my iPad Air for different things than my iPhone or Mac, I don’t need Handoff to share activities between these very different devices. If this also describes you, then you can save a bit of battery life by disabling Handoff, another wireless technology that is using battery resources in the background to search for compatible devices even when you aren’t actively using it. To disable Handoff, go to Settings > General > Handoff and toggle off the feature.
5. Don’t push, fetch less
If your iPad Air isn’t your primary device for checking email, you don’t need to have new messages constantly pushed to the device or have it frequently fetch new messages. Check your mail settings to make sure push is turned off and fetch set to Manually, or, if you must, Hourly. You can adjust Push and Fetch settings by following this path: Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data.
You can select to have data fetched for your iCloud account and any email accounts you set up with the Mail app. Choose Fetch or Manual for these accounts, and then select the frequency with which you’d like to fetch data.
6. Reduce Background App Activity
Next on our list is limiting background app activities on your iPad Air. Background apps essentially function even when you’re not directly using them. Examples include VPN, Maps, health, and calendar apps. These apps monitor or control certain aspects of your phone without you intervening, which, while convenient, causes your iPad Air battery to drain faster.
What’s more, you probably don’t need a good number of these apps to be working in the background. So, how can you reduce background app activity?
Head to Settings > General > Background App Refresh and you can turn Background App Refresh off entirely or select which apps you’d like to refresh in the background.
7. Keep an eye on location services
Many people claim you should force-quit out of apps, say, each night before bed. I’m lucky if I get all the dishes cleaned up before hitting the sack, so I certainly don’t have the time or the energy to be closing iPad Air apps on a regular basis. Plus, it has not been definitively proven to me that apps running in the background drain battery life to any great extent. I will, however, force-close Google Maps or any other GPS app, since these do seem to drain the iPad Air’s battery.
There are a huge number of apps that can track your location. While you may think these apps solely track your location when you’re directly using them, this isn’t always the case. This constant location monitoring requires energy and can take a toll on your iPad Air battery life.
To keep tabs on which of your apps are using location services. Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services to adjust which apps are requesting your location.
To kill four wireless birds — cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS — with one stone, simply turn on Airplane Mode from the top option listed in Settings or from the Control Center.
8. No more notifications
When you install a new app on your iPad Air, the chances are that its notification settings will be automatically activated. But you don’t necessarily need to receive notifications from every app you have, and doing so can have a detrimental effect on the length of your iPad Air battery life. Notifications also wake up an idle iPad Air and turn on the display, which consumes battery power. So, you can deactivate notifications for certain apps to help mitigate battery loss. Go to Settings > Notifications and choose which apps can push notifications your way.
9. See which apps are battery hogs
On the iPad Air, the Battery page in settings is useful because it shows you which apps have used the most battery resources in the last 24 hours and the last seven days. If your iPad Air is running through battery life at a disturbingly fast pace, check here to see which apps are the cause and then quit using those apps until you can charge your iPad Air.
10. Quick trigger for Auto-Lock
Why let an idle iPad Air run down your battery? With Auto-Lock, your iPad Air will shut down after it has been inactive for a period of time. You can set it as short as 2 minutes. To set a time period for Auto-Lock, head to Settings > Display & Brightness > Auto-Lock.
11. Climate control
Excess heat can affect battery life. Apple recommends keeping your iPad Air between 32 and 95 degrees Fahrenheit, and points to the range of 62 to 72 degrees as the comfort zone. This means keep your iPad Air in the shade at the beach, out of locked cars in the summer, and off of heaters in the winter.
Also, if you have a case that envelopes your iPad Air and can cause it to heat up when it’s charging, remove your iPad Air from the case before charging it.
12. Update Your iPad Air to the Latest Software
Apple occasionally releases iPadOS updates to keep the iPad smooth and glitch-free. Alongside, Apple also adds some battery-related features to increase the life span of the iPad Air battery. With that in mind, it’s always advisable to keep your iPadOS up to date. Go to Settings > General > Software Update to check if an update is available for your iPad Air.
Say Goodbye to a Flat iPad Air Battery With These Power-Saving Tips
It’s always a pain to have your iPad Air die unexpectedly, but with the above-mentioned tips and tricks, you will see an improvement in iPad Air battery life.
If you’re watching full HD movies with the brightness turned all the way up, or you’re performing power intensive tasks like gaming, your iPad Air is still going to die on you in a few hours. But in general use, the above tips should help you get more juice out of your iPad Air.
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