My wife got one, and the first week she had it she was surfing forums and mucking around with the task monitor and RegEdit (!) in order to deal with some runaway process caused by an errant app. Maybe a game. We never found out. It's supposed to be designed so it can't go haywire that way, but it does. Fail.
Never heard of such a problem on an iPad.
The Windows division might think it knows how to deliver a tablet-friendly OS, but really, it doesn't. It's clownville; they don't understand how to do box-level security (as on consoles) and they don't know how to do stability at the level required by a "mom" consumer product. (The Xbox group took Win8 and had to do extensive modifications in order to make it play well -- the original mandate from the execs were "run Win8 without any changes" and /that/ would have been a fucking disaster).
If Microsoft is serious about putting a real "tabletized" version of Win8 in consumer hands, they need to do a bunch of housecleaning and internal education. It's a mess.
My iPad has now reached the point where, if I don't carefully set it into Airplane mode, Battery drains in 24 hours, even when asleep. I don't know if it's my mail client, or a background task being woke up by a geofence, or one of the GPS/WiFi radios - but I can't reliably leave it sitting around for several days anymore.
So, now I get into the game of "Disable Location Services for All applications, Disable Notification Services for All Applications, Turn off all Radios - NOW, turn on a small handful of services, and observe for a week - if everything looks good, turn on some more - keep doing so until the battery starts draining in 24 hours, and then try and identify the errant applications"
My #1 gripe about the iPad continues to be battery draining because of background tasks. If I could only "Force" the iPad into NO MULTITASKING, Single Damn Application at a time and NOTHING else mode, Don't Check Email, Don't Check GPS, Don't play music, Don't Download - I'd be happy. The only reliable way I've found of guranteeing this is to power it down - but it takes a long time (90+ seconds) to power it up each time I want to use it, which kind of detracts from the device...
So, no - iPad is not perfect. I would say 50% of my time this trip, when I went to use it, battery was completely dead so I ended up with my MacBook Air sitting on my chest to do reading.
The hardware is fine - if I put it in Airplane mode, or, carefully disable every single background process, then it can sit in sleep mode with little battery loss, for a week.
I guess another way of double checking this, is just reinstalling the Operating System from scratch at the Genius Bar.
It's not possible for software to misbehave on iOS. The system is ridiculously strict and "background processes" are basically faked and can only run for 10 minutes before they're killed.
That's not clear at all because he states that the battery works fine when he runs it in airplane mode.
If anything is clear it's that he uses a setting that activates the radios too often or an app that spams notifications. Without knowing anything else about his setup I'd implicate a busy push email.
Or you know you could reinstall iOS via iTunes pretty easily. Why do you need a genius bar?
And by carefully disabling every background process - what exactly do you mean? Other than mail checking - what user controllable background processes are there?
Closing Apps in the multi-tasking switcher has been the only way, on both the iPhone and iPad, to save your battery when apps on iOS run out of control.
I certain I'm not the only person who has felt their iPhone get hot, and shut down everything in the switcher to recover the and stop the battery from draining?
Likewise with the iPad, making sure every music, every voip, every downloading, every geo-fence, every GPS, every-single-app is shut down is the only way I can keep my iPad Battery from draining after running a good handful of apps.
That, or just powering it down - which, as I said earlier, kind of defeats the purpose....
if you run an app and switch out then it can perform a network operation or a few other very specific tasks but they're all killed after 10 minutes anyway.
The whole multitasking part of iOS is basically smoke and mirrors. Manually quitting tasks is pretty much voodoo at this point
Never heard of such a problem on an iPad.
The Windows division might think it knows how to deliver a tablet-friendly OS, but really, it doesn't. It's clownville; they don't understand how to do box-level security (as on consoles) and they don't know how to do stability at the level required by a "mom" consumer product. (The Xbox group took Win8 and had to do extensive modifications in order to make it play well -- the original mandate from the execs were "run Win8 without any changes" and /that/ would have been a fucking disaster).
If Microsoft is serious about putting a real "tabletized" version of Win8 in consumer hands, they need to do a bunch of housecleaning and internal education. It's a mess.