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

[Richard Pieri]

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.

-- 
Rich P.