How to Get Better iPad Battery Life

Apple launched the new iPad Air back in October boasting up to 10 hours of battery life for the thinner and lighter slate, which is a slight improvement over older models. However, sometimes that still isn’t enough for some users, so here are some tips and tricks on how to get even better iPad battery life the next time you really need it.

10 hours of battery life for the iPad Air is quite impressive, but there are definitely times when you might need to squeeze out just a bit more juice from the battery, especially during situations where you’re not near an outlet for a significant period of time. You could buy one of those external battery packs, but spending more money on iPad accessories just isn’t in the cards for everyone. However, there are various tricks that you can do and settings you can change in order to squeeze another hour or two of battery life out of your iPad.

Some of these tricks may seem obvious, while others you might be hitting yourself in the head for because you’ve never thought about them. Whatever the case may be, they’ll give your iPad a good boost in battery life for when you need it the most.

Dim the Screen

Probably the easiest trick you can do in order to get more battery life out of your iPad is to dim your iPad’s display. You can easily do this from Control Center by swiping up from the bottom of the screen and using the slider on the right to adjust the screen brightness.

You can easily add an hour or two of battery life to  your iPad just by dimming the display and not having it on full blast. Plus, since the iPad is mostly used at home while lying in bed, the screen doesn’t even need to be on full brightness anyway, since low-light conditions allow you to lower the screen brightness while still being able to easily see what’s on the screen.

Of course, your iPad can automatically adjust the brightness based on the ambient light in the room, but it’s a feature that could use some improvement, since you could still dim the screen down a bit and be just fine with visibility.

Disable Background App Refresh

You know all those apps that you have in the background when you access the app switcher? By default, they’re all set to automatically refresh for new data, which uses up your data or WiFi, which then uses up your battery more quickly. It’s a handy feature, though, that way when you open an app later on, it’ll already be updated with fresh content.

This can be useful and all, but it eats away battery like nobody’s business, so you’re probably better off disabling Background App Refresh in the iOS settings. The biggest downside to this is that you’ll have to wait a few more seconds for apps to refresh with new data before you can start using them again, but it beats having your iPad’s battery drain down to the single digits when an outlet is nowhere to be found.

To disable Background App Refresh, open up the Settings app and navigate to General > Background App Refresh. From there, just turn off the toggle to the right of Background App Refresh. You can also leave the feature on but only disable it for certain apps.

Turn on Airplane Mode

Whenever you’re not using your iPad, it’s best to enable Airplane Mode. This turns off WiFi, cellular, Bluetooth and GPS, all of which can be responsible for huge battery drains on your iPad.

Of course, if you need to use WiFi, you can turn off Airplane Mode by still having WiFi on, that way you can still browse the internet, but you’ll be saving some battery at the same time, so it’s a win-win situation.

Furthermore, you can get even more juice out of your iPad if you enable Airplane Mode before you go to bed that night, that way your iPad isn’t spending the entire night wasting battery by keeping a WiFi or data connection, since you don’t even use it during those hours anyway. I started doing this with my iPad mini and noticed that I didn’t need to charge it up as much, because you’re essentially enabling Airplane Mode for a third of the day, every day.

Stay Away from Games and Videos

This kind of goes without saying, but playing games and watching videos severely hits at your iPad’s battery life. It’s no big deal if you’re near an outlet, but doing these activities when you know you should be saving battery life probably isn’t the best strategy.

If you absolutely need to play games because you’re that bored, at least enable Airplane Mode if the game or video doesn’t require an internet connection. This will save at least a bit of battery while you’re still having fun.