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Joe Mac User

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 15, 2004
89
142
Houston, TX
I can pretty consistently get my Apple Watch Series 5 Nike (GPS + CELL) to crash. All I have to do is be out for a walk or run without my iPhone, listening with my AirPods Pro, and say something like, "Hey Siri, play the album [whatever]," choosing an album that's NOT preloaded on my Watch. The Watch will start playing the music but after a few seconds goes silent and I hear the disconnect chime in my AirPods. I look at the Watch and it soon shows me the Apple logo indicating it is rebooting.

When it finishes, the first thing it tells me is that my battery is below 10% and do I want to use Low Power Mode. However, immediately before the Hey Siri request, I have seen it was nowhere near 10%, usually 50% or even more. So that's not the issue (though to me it indicates a problem since the battery charge is inaccurate).

I have been having this problem for a long time, so it's not the watchOS version. I keep watchOS updated and it's almost always the current release version. It is currently at watchOS 8.3.

Last weekend I tried Unpairing and Re-pairing the Watch. I even went so far as to set it up as a new Watch (I had too many apps I wasn't using anyway) but the problem continues.

It's disappointing that I cannot rely on this Watch to do stuff over cellular even though I paid extra for it as well as paying a monthly fee to my carrier as well. In fact, the other weekend I was using it to talk to my mother while I was out on a walk and I warned her that we could get disconnected and if that happened I might not be able to call her back for a while. The Watch crashed and died and didn't even reboot that time so I had to walk home and call her when I got there. There was no warning, no low battery level notice or anything.

Has anyone else had problems while streaming with just their Watch over cellular?
 
Funny thing, this. I upgraded to the Series 7 back in February and the problems went away. While sometimes I get a spinning wheel for a minute, the Watch has hard crashed on me maybe once since I got it, and I'm trying to remember what happened. But everything I described above has been "fixed" since replacing the Watch. I don't know why. One guess is that the battery charge wasn't as good or accurate as I thought. I've noticed some reports saying that watchOS 9 will recalibrate the battery charge after it's installed on Series 4 and 5. Or maybe the hardware is different enough that it now works reliably. Sometimes I will get a reply from Siri saying she cannot connect to the Internet to play what I requested, but when I try again in a block or so, it's fine.
 
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