Ask HN: Why iPad/iPhone battery drains even when powered off?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29563248

by dt3ft • 5 years ago

5 8 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

When I power an iPad off (latest available device and software) while its battery is at 100% charge, after a week or so of it sitting in a drawer, its battery is completely drained of power and it can no longer boot up without recharging. If I do the same with my nintendo gameboy advance, the device still boots up and has almost full charge even after a year of sitting in a drawer, powered off. Why is this happening? What am I missing?

ssss11• 5 years ago

There’s a chip that is on even when the device is off - others will have more information and links. There was discussion recently about this.

I think it’s to keep Bluetooth on for ‘FindMy’ functionality…

bsjks• 5 years ago

I don’t think that that feature is using 100% of battery in a week.

dt3ft2• 5 years ago

This is what I'd venture to say as well, having had my fair share of experience tinkering with attiny45, which I could run for years on very low power. It doesn't add up.

bellyfullofbac• 5 years ago

Ask HN: Why are people turning HN to StackExchange?

dt3ft2• 5 years ago

You may want to read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Crosseye_Jack2• 5 years ago

Because replies like this turned StackExchange into what it is today. So people stopped asking questions there and started asking questions elsewhere. https://youtu.be/IbDAmvUwo5c

Sadly some people on these other communities seem unwilling to answer such questions if they know the answer or just ignore the question if not and in turn answer with “this isn’t Reddit/stack/quora”, when it actually holds the community members that could actually answer the question that was asked.

It’s a shame really.

Crosseye_Jack2• 5 years ago

Hard to say without having the device in hand and you willing to allow some probative research (and from my screen replacement days, people tend to get twitchy off you have to remove the person from the phone for longer than an hour, heck I was the same when I last had apple replace my battery).

It could be a number of things, a bad battery not retaining charge as well as it should. It could be that one of the other processors on the device didn’t get the message to power off (which is my guess).

If it’s a continuing issues I suggest backing up the device, factory resetting it and then reflashing iOS (you can use ipsw.me or 3utools to download the ISPs file needed, if you used 3utools, you can then use that to flash it or (iirc) hold down shift/option as you click the restore button in iTunes (with the phone connected) and then select the ipsw file downloaded.

Restore the phone with your fresh backup and try again. Hopefully that will kick anything that was hanging around after power down to get the message.

neximo64• 5 years ago

It's not actually off when you turn it off.

Ask HN: Why iPad/iPhone battery drains even when powered off?

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