The New iPad Is All Battery Inside

Knowing that the iPad 2 boasts a 25-watt-hour battery that already takes up three quarters of the space inside its chassis, one has to wonder how much room can the new iPad’s 42.5-watt-hour battery take?

The lot, according to Jordan Kahn of 9to5mac, who easily deducted that the rechargeable lithium-polymer battery with 70 percent more capacity will cover almost the entire surface area of the new tablet computer.

Apple increased the size of the battery mainly to cope with the much more powerful A5X processor that outputs crisp graphics onto a Retina display made up of a whopping 3.1 million pixels.

That’s not all though. The battery also needs to provide 10 hours of “wireless productivity” in accordance with Apple’s marketing materials. 3G radios are power hungry enough. The new LTE chips found inside the third-generation iPad will have an even greater appetite.

Granted, Apple does say the new iPad offers only 9 hours of productivity on LTE.

Not to mention that the A5X is said to have double the RAM of the A5. According to Kahn, 1GB of random access memory “would [also] require additional power.”

All in all, Apple made every effort imaginable to keep the longstanding battery life of the iPad in place.

Prior to Apple’s March 7 event in San Francisco, I’d been asked by some of my Twitter followers whether I believed the next-generation iPad would offer less battery life, the culprit being all of the rumored enhancements.

My answers were swift, mainly because of the 140 character limit that the microblogging service imposes per each message, but also because I knew Apple would never downgrade such a vital aspect like battery life.

It’s simply not good for business. I estimated that whatever sorcery Apple had to pull in order to keep marketing the iPad with its 10 hour battery, they’d do it. Between you and me, it was a no brainer.

Posted in: Preview, Tablet