Is this normal? 1 hour of playing.

[twerppoet]

Actually I thought about doing the math straight up like you laid out but I wanted to give a sense of how much of an impact is really happening if you think a battery should be replaced once it hits 80% of capacity. On an iPhone 4S the difference between new and 300 cycle later is very dramatic. Well over an hour of usage is lost.

But I was glad to see the newer iPads are at 1000 cycles. For me that means I should get more than 4 years of use before I hit 500 cycles (recharge every three days).

Ok. I can understand that.

Apple has been improving their batteries every year/model. It's pretty amazing how the've made products more powerful and made them smaller (or nearly the same size) without compromising on battery life.

In each keynote, after telling you how more amazing a new product is they always end it with 'and it still gets x hours of battery life'. It's easy to overlook how much work that took.