the pixels are made up of little lights and the new iPad has four times as many. four times as many pixels to light up and a much more intense graphics chip is going to suck the battery dry faster than the two. LTE is also very bad at draining batteries quickly. They doubled the battery and with only double the battery the new iPad seems to hold up to about the same time as the previous model. I do find that the new iPad is much better at handling the auto-brightness, also I'm finding in my own personal use that with the brightness down the new iPad is lasting longer than the amount of time I was getting from my first gen iPad.