Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Apple Watch Battery could last just 3 hours

virginblue4 said:
Yes, if you use it as a phone. But you have a phone for that.
Click to expand...
This is true. But the battery only lasts 7 hours if you're doing health monitoring, which would rule it out as a sleep tracker. Which is ruled out, anyway, because you have to charge it overnight, which is when most users would be sleeping, if I remember correctly.

I just have a hard time understanding why Apple would put so much effort into designing such a terrific device and then skimp on the battery. I sure hope they fix that in future versions, because there's no way I can justify buying a device with such a short operating life as this. There's no way I can justify it, anyway, since it's just a front-end to your phone, which you have to have with you to use the watch. There's a lot I like about the Watch, but the net is that it just doesn't make a lot of practical sense. Yet, anyway.
 
How stupid, you would clearly use the watch as a phone in situations where your phone was not at hand, such as you were upstairs and left the phone downstairs.

I also doubt many people are going to want to walk around holding their wrist to their mouths, it is clearly on the watch as a convenience application for short calls.
 
Yes.

If I use my Macbook Air to watch YouTube videos non-stop... it will die really fast. My real-life usage (i.e. 99.9% of the time)... doing typical MacBook-y things... battery life is fine.

Buy it
Use it feverishly in the first few days
Post a thread complaining about battery life because of heavy usage/misusage (optional)
Understand how it fits into your life
Disable some notifications
Download killer apps from awesome developers
Appreciation for AW
Can't live without it/shower with it (Tim Cook joke)
Everything is fine

Everyone just take a deep breath. Everything is based on speculation at the moment. Come back to this forum in a few months after we actually get to use this product.
 
Armen said:
https://www.apple.com/watch/battery.html

I'll take Apple's word over Telegraph's.
Click to expand...
Telegraph was quoting Apple's information.

----------
Con1750 said:
How stupid, you would clearly use the watch as a phone in situations where your phone was not at hand, such as you were upstairs and left the phone downstairs.

I also doubt many people are going to want to walk around holding their wrist to their mouths, it is clearly on the watch as a convenience application for short calls.
Click to expand...
Actually, I agree with that. But that still doesn't mean that the battery is correctly sized for the Watch. The battery is the Achilles heel for this device.

I have a FitBit Flex, which of course isn't comparable to an Apple Watch. But its charge lasts a whole week. I also have a Casio G Force watch, which is also not comparable, but it's solar powered and never needs to be recharged. Like it or not, these devices do set the level of expectation among potential buyers about what the charge life should be for watches and watch-like devices.

There is no way I'd spend hundreds of dollars on a "watch" that only stays charged for 18 hours.
 
lockerc18 said:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/sho...h-battery-lasts-as-little-as-three-hours.html

Note the graph in the article. If you use the Watch as a phone, the battery lasts just 3 hours.

Sorry, folks. There is a lot of really outstanding engineering in this device. But Apple has fallen down on the battery. That will make this a very niche product.
Click to expand...

I can't remember the last time I used my phone to make phone calls that totaled 3 hours in a given day

I understand the concern people have over battery life, however, consider that this usage test is if someone was on the watch for 180 minutes nonstop having a conversation. That isn't bad considering its size.

Odds are the time a person will go on a watch phone call will likely be seconds to maybe a minute. When you're in the car, assuming you don't have Bluetooth, you'll probably use it longer than a minute, but even then.

While I do think battery life is a legitimate concern, I don't think the level of complaint from some is merited, given this thing is the size of an iPod shuffle and can do (for the most part) what an iPhone can on a scaled down version.
 
If I run this car engine at 8-10k rpm for 3 hours non stop, it's gonna run out of gas. If I run it 1-2k rpm with a few high spikes, it will last a lot longer.

lockerc18 said:
I just have a hard time understanding why Apple would put so much effort into designing such a terrific device and then skimp on the battery.
Click to expand...

As good as their engineers are, they can't break the laws of physics.
 
Hell, I don't use my iPhone as a phone for three hours in a WEEK, let alone in a single day!

And still people are getting "Health Tracking" and "Activity Tracking" mixed up. Health Tracking means 7 hours of dedicated workout tracking, not background activity tracking.
 
Well I wouldn't want to criticize anyone's use case - but I don't see the need for using the watch as a phone and there are so few occasions I can see it working effectively.

That being said - Apple didn't fall down on battery life. As I've maintained for several months now - this is where battery tech is. Android Wear, Samsung Gear, Apple - they are all subject to the same restrictions based on the size of their device and battery capacity. Oh sure there will be variances given the OS and screen - but overall - no smart watch using Android Wear or Apple's OS is going to last more than about 2 days with moderate usage. Naturally this will ALL be related to individual use cases.

I may have think Apple missed the mark on a few things here - but NO one should really be surprised at battery life.
 
madsci954 said:
If I run this car engine at 8-10k rpm for 3 hours non stop, it's gonna run out of gas. If I run it 1-2k rpm with a few high spikes, it will last a lot longer.



As good as their engineers are, they can't break the laws of physics.
Click to expand...
But Apple doesn't have engineers. They have technology GODS, to whom normal laws of science don't apply.

You could make the case that this device is so sophisticated and all powerful that there's no way battery technology could keep up. And that might be true, at least partly. But I'd hope that when battery technology does catch up, you could swap your old battery out for the new type which would provide better charge life. And I'd hope that future versions of this device would offer other methods of charging, like solar, at least as complementary charging.

----------
DC Wallaby said:
Hell, I don't use my iPhone as a phone for three hours in a WEEK, let alone in a single day!

And still people are getting "Health Tracking" and "Activity Tracking" mixed up. Health Tracking means 7 hours of dedicated workout tracking, not background activity tracking.
Click to expand...
I was referring to tracking sleep, like my FitBit Flex does.
 
lockerc18 said:
I was referring to tracking sleep, like my FitBit Flex does.
Click to expand...
Yes. I know.

And which category do you think sleep tracking falls under? The "Fitness Tracking" (intensive workout tracking using a lot of the device's sensors and processing power) or the "Activity Tracking" (which it does constantly during the day and does not drain the battery in 7 hours)?
 
lockerc18 said:
But Apple doesn't have engineers. They have technology GODS, to whom normal laws of science don't apply.
Click to expand...

No. The engineers at Apple are obviously very, very good. But they are not gods. The battery life of the Apple Watch is fine. As others have already pointed out, if I use my Macbook Pro to play Call of Duty at full settings at high brightness, it will die very fast, and it would not be accurate to call that time my normal battery life. Would I love it if the Apple Watch lasted all week? All month? Year? Of course, but that's completely impossible in 2015, so I have to commend Apple on what they've accomplished.
 
DC Wallaby said:
Yes. I know.

And which category do you think sleep tracking falls under? The "Fitness Tracking" (intensive workout tracking using a lot of the device's sensors and processing power) or the "Activity Tracking" (which it does constantly during the day and does not drain the battery in 7 hours)?
Click to expand...
Sleep tracking falls under the category of "Can't do this because the Watch is being charged overnight as per Apple's recommendations, since the battery lasts only 18 hours under what they consider to be "normal" usage."
 
lockerc18 said:
This is true. But the battery only lasts 7 hours if you're doing health monitoring, which would rule it out as a sleep tracker.
Click to expand...

Not true. 7 hours as a WORKOUT tracker, which means the heart-rate monitor is in constant use.

Nobody is going to monitor their heart-rate for 7 continuous hours. You can easily monitor it in intervals. The watch lasts all day tracking steps, standing, heart-rate, etc.

----------
lockerc18 said:
Sleep tracking falls under the category of "Can't do this because the Watch is being charged overnight as per Apple's recommendations, since the battery lasts only 18 hours under what they consider to be "normal" usage."
Click to expand...

Yes, the rules say you can only charge your watch at night when you should be sleeping. It's impossible to charge it at any other time. That's what the rules say.
 
Really this just shows how odd it is the watch has so many apps on it. Email, text, and simple notifications is all that is really needed.

The apps will encourage people to use the watch as a phone, and I am sure people will feel let down by the battery life.
 
People need to figure out what they want the Apple Watch for.

Clue: It's a watch.

Oh, and you can check notifications and control your iPhone's music playing.

The battery life is fine. No-one's using an Apple Watch to have three hour phone calls. Even if they do, it'll still give them another 72 hours of being a watch.
 
Battery life will become more apparent and problematic when app developers push the boundary and entice people to use the watch more and more (like what happened to iPhone)

For example, always on health/fitness tracking (and Apple states the battery is only good for 7 hours, that's not even a full day). As you can see, you do not need to be consciously using the watch for the battery to drain to the point that it becomes "just a watch that tells time".

I would expect a minimal acceptable battery life for the watch to go prime time is at least 24 hours of battery life with all sensors on collecting data.

----------
lockerc18 said:
Sleep tracking falls under the category of "Can't do this because the Watch is being charged overnight as per Apple's recommendations, since the battery lasts only 18 hours under what they consider to be "normal" usage."
Click to expand...

"Problem" can "easily" be solved if you buy 2 watches instead of 1.

Smart move Apple... Smart move....

/s
 
The iPhone 6 weighs 129 grams. A very large portion of that is battery. 3G talk time is 14 hours. The 42mm apple watch sport weighs 30 grams. Unless you want to lug around another 100 grams in battery on your wrist, this is what it is. Smaller device has a smaller battery. What more do you want?
 
lockerc18 said:
Sleep tracking falls under the category of "Can't do this because the Watch is being charged overnight as per Apple's recommendations, since the battery lasts only 18 hours under what they consider to be "normal" usage."
Click to expand...
... It only takes 2.5 hours to charge from 0 to 100. Come on. Don't be dense.
 
lockerc18 said:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/sho...h-battery-lasts-as-little-as-three-hours.html

Note the graph in the article. If you use the Watch as a phone, the battery lasts just 3 hours.

Sorry, folks. There is a lot of really outstanding engineering in this device. But Apple has fallen down on the battery. That will make this a very niche product.
Click to expand...

If you use an iPhone as a TV the battery on high brightness the battery lasts 2 hours. If you put a BMW 335 in sport mode gas mileage drops from 20mpg to 15. If you run in dress shoes the heel will wear faster than if you walked the same distance.

Look, no one is have long conversations with their watch. They'll say "hello" so it doesn't go to VM or answer a quick question. Use it as intended and the battery will last 18 hrs.

And this thing about sleep tracking. I don't understand it. I've used it before. It told me when I slept and when I woke up briefly but I alread knew that. I also knew if I felt rested or not w/o the tracker telling me.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back