Out of the blue, WiFi shut down on my iPad Pro 11” (2018) last night. Option for WiFi greyed out in the settings panel. I wasn’t too concerned at first. Rebooted. Reset some things. No joy. Started to worry. Even more so when I plugged it in to charge and got no charge indicator. Hm. Tried everything to resolve the charging issue— different cables, different power bricks, cleaned the USB-C port; everything. No dice.
I should say that I was running 14.5 pb1 at the time. It just so happened that 14.5 pb2 appeared in my updates screen, and had already downloaded itself in the background. WiFi came back randomly just as I resolved to install that update; I went ahead nonetheless, hoping that the issues I was seeing would be magically resolved.
An update cycle later, I had an iPad Pro on 14.5 pb2 that still wouldn’t charge, but was now also rebooting itself every 5-10 minutes or so. Battery also seemed to be running down faster than usual; I was pretty much watching it bleed power, and closer it got to 50% the worse the situation felt. No response to charging cable also meant no plugging into another machine to restore from a back-up. Stuck.
That’s pretty much where the story ends, for now. I erased it and reset to factory settings, hoping I could restore from an iCloud back-up, but couldn’t get it past the language setting screen without it rebooting and starting over again. I’ve managed to power it down, so at least it’s not bleeding power so quickly, but it was already down to 50-something percent power before I (somehow?) broke the reboot loop. So it’s not looking hopeful.
All I can think is that I got hit by a failed charging port AND a bad beta installation at the same time. Really didn’t need quite this compelling a reason to look out for March iPad upgrades… 
