[Discuss] My God! It's Full of Batteries!

[adler at stephenadler.com (Stephen Adler)]

Is the lack of air flow a good or bad thing? Are the new iPad going to
make good hand warmers?

Cheers. Steve.

On Fri, 2012-03-16 at 10:17 -0400, Richard Pieri wrote:
> iFixit got their hands on one of the first The New iPads (by Ghu that's 
> an unwieldly name) yesterday and proceeded to take it apart.  This is 
> relevant to the recent discussion about tablets and power consumption. 
> For comparison, I have here an HP Pavilion dm1-4010us notebook with 
> 11.6" 1336x768 screen and Fusion E-450 APU clocked at 1.65GHz.  The 
> battery pack on it is rated at 55 Watt-hours and HP rates the whole kit 
> as running "up to 9.5 hours" on battery power.
> 
> iPad 2 has 25 Watt-hours of battery packs inside the case and is rated 
> at 9-10 hours run time.  The The New iPad (by Ghu that's *still* an 
> unwieldly name) has 42.5 Watt-hours of battery packs inside delivering 
> the same 9-10 hours run time.  Nobody's publicly posted the TDP numbers 
> yet but you can figure it's rather higher than iPad 2's based on the 
> power consumption.
> 
> It was suggested that these devices could ramp up their bus and CPU 
> clocks when on mains power.  It's not "just" ramping up the clocks.  You 
> need to cool it.  Even fanless Atom netbooks have open space for 
> convection cooling.  There is no space inside iPads for airflow.  The 
> metal case back is how iPads dissipate heat.  Apple doesn't even use 
> screws because they take up too much space.  It's all glued together.
> 
> That's the design philosophy for these things.  Doesn't matter who makes 
> them, be it Apple or Motorola or Barnes & Noble or whoever.  More 
> battery equals more run time equals better product.  They're not going 
> to "waste" space for airflow when that space could be used for more battery.
>