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Apple Watch Owners Complain of Battery Life Issues With Both Series 5 and Older Models With watchOS 6

QCassidy352 said:
Uh, what? LTE? 42 or 38mm?

my s3 LTE/38 doesn’t get anywhere close to that and never has.
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42mm GPS.

Thats what I’m saying - I’ve never seen it this good! Went to bed super late last night, so 16-17 hours of use and it was 60-odd%. Now I’m afraid to update this ever again.

It’s battery that I’m keeping an eye out for in the next releases Apple have in the future for the watch. Just want to see it last 3 days!
 
Already returned s5. Back to s3. Sorry Apple. Skimping on the chip was bad enough since it’s already a year out of date. AOD almost made up for it but worse battery life too much of a downgrade.

Hopefully S6 will be worthwhile.
 
I have a Series 4 SS. WatchOS6 was awful at first. Usually could go 18 hours on a single charge with OS5. On OS6 it was 4 hours.
I searched everywhere, turning everything on and off.

For me it was Walkie-Talkie Availability, even though I had turned off Walkie-Talkie in settings. Had to go into Control Center at the bottom to turn off this function. Why is this function still on if I turned it off in Settings?

Turned it off, got my 18 hour battery life back.
 
It seems about the same on my S4, no noticeable huge change personally... thankfully.

I did notice the battery drains slightly faster when I had the cool "Solar Dial" face (with all complications active) compared to the very simple "Numerals Duo" face. I just suspected the more complex the watch face, the faster the battery drains.
 
S5 44mm Titanium Cellular seems to be getting a little better, but not much compared to S4. On my wrist since 6am ET. Now at 79% at 9:53am ET. 30 min workout with music from the watch and wifi connection. AOD still on, noise detection off.
 
My new S5 (44mm non cellular) was really bad for battery to start with. I turned off AOD and it still wasn't great, only just getting through the day.

Anyway, after I updated to 6.0.1 it seems to have gone totally the other way. I wear it overnight for sleep tracking and put it on around midnight yesterday fully charged. It's now 3.20pm, so I've been wearing it for over 15 hours, have done an hour long workout, and it is now on 65%. Usage is showing as 3hr 47m
 
S5 44mm Cellular.

With "Always On" turned on
Daily usage (between 7AM and 6PM...100% battery to start) - about 70%.
Night usage (use AutoSleep - 7-8 hours sleep... 100% battery to start) - about 30%

With "Always On" turned off
Daily usage (between 7AM and 6PM...100% battery to start) - about 15%.
Night usage (use AutoSleep - 7-8 hours sleep... 100% battery to start) - about 3%

Note: both Walkie Talkie and Nosie are both turned off.

I knew there was going to be a difference in how much the battery is used, but WOW. I guess, however, this still meets the specs in which Apple states the battery in the S5 has, but disappointed, just the same.
 
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Quote said:
Apple claims the Series 5 has 18 hour battery life. User in the quote claims battery drains 5% per hour. 100 divided by 5 = 20. So it has 20 hour battery life, what's the problem?
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Yes, the quotes on their websites are canned, They are identical except for the model. Both have 18hour battery life. My S3 Cellular would get me 2 days or more, depending how often I got notifications on it, and that was with the Walkie-Talkie turned on. I know each person's usage is unique, but really, when you give us the same numbers, with added features from the 3, but on Apples website, they are given both the same life span. One other note, is on the Apple website, the S5 tests were done with PRE-PRODUCTION models, at least the S3 test were done using shipping versions.

I have run a few days with Always on turned on and yes, it will probably get me the 18 hours (all-day battery life) apple quotes, but turn that feature off, based on what I am seeing now, I probably can get the 2 days or more out of the S5. Also, I don't think this is about apples statement of All-day battery life (up to 18 hours), but more about the comparison between the s3/s4 and the s5 with the added features that really drains the battery, pretty quickly, compared to the features being turned off
 
I just got my series 5 yesterday coming from a series 3 (got it at release). I took the watch off the charger at 5:15 am this morning and started a run at 5:30am (I do this daily).

The run was 39 minutes long using the mapmyrun app, gps, cellular, streaming music from my watch to bluetooth headphones, and using a bluetooth chest strap heart rate monitor. I have not been doing anything on it. The occasional alerts coming through is all. I do not have the sound or fall detection on, but the always on screen is enabled.

It is currently 11:30am and my watch is now at 58%. That is an average of 7% an hour of battery loss.

I will test it tomorrow with the screen off to see how much improvement I see on it. Maybe test it will cellular off as well the next day. I can say that my series 3 under the same conditions would last twice as long as this series 5 currently is.

The crazy thing is, that my series 3 wouldn't last for a half marathon with the same conditions listed above while running so I bought this thing hoping the battery life would be better.
 
My less than a year old watch 4's battery life was depreciating by noon each day after the update. I took it to the Apple store and they are replacing the watch.
 
Westside guy said:
I stand corrected... in your case, at a minimum. 😁 But I have seen an awful lot of "I'm losing 5% an hour" or "I've only had it on 12 hours and I'm down to 40%" sorts of complaints.

Don't get me wrong - I do hope Apple quickly tunes iOS 6 so we get much better battery life. I'd prefer to get my old results of 1.5-2 days on a charge (from my Series 1!), if only because more cushion is always better. But my Series 5 exceeded Apple's claimed 18 hours right out of the gate... by a small amount, at least.
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For what it is worth...my second watch, after a day of usage, is doing much better. Perhaps there was something syncing in the background that took awhile to get ironed out, plus 6.0.1 may have helped.
 
Series 4 non cellular, with the noise monitor on.

No noticeable difference in battery life....
 
My watch is fine when I don’t workout but I am experiencing huge drain when I workout .
It drops about 1% per minute in an indoor workout while playing music stored on the watch. Yesterday going from 75% to 35% in 40 mins. It did this the other day as well and I thought it may be the complications so yesterday I just used the California watch face and launched workout and music manually. Made no difference.
As this is one of the major use cases for the watch for me it is really disappointing.

I am starting to think that it may be the cellular as I don’t have my phone at the Gym and it has patchy cell reception so maybe it is draining the battery fast because of that. BTW my series 3 worked really well in this scenario.

For me this watch does tell time but is a really bad fitness tracker.
 
My wife and I have the stainless steel series 4. Her battery life is terrible after updating. She puts in on at 6am and by 5pm her watch is dead. Mine with that same time period I'm only down to 60%. Something is definitely wrong with the software. She had turned on the new noise app so we thought it was that. After turning it off she is still seeing the same results. Hope Apple fixes this soon.
 
My first day, I noticed a significant difference. I chalked this up to me setting both my new iPhone and Watch up as *new* devices, where the default setting is to install every iOS app that has a WatchOS app automatically (normally I have just a handful of third-party apps, but this time I ended up with 35 or so).

The second day the battery drained to 18%, and it shocked me. Then I realized I spent 3.5 hours on a boat in rough seas, which really exercised the motion coprocessor.

Every day since then I've had fairly normal battery life. I put my watch on at 6:15am and now, at 2pm, it still has 70% left. That's a little worse than usual, but I should easily be able to get 18 hours from it.
 
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Just sharing the experience of WatchOS 6 on 2 x Apple Watch Series 4 (with cellular capability model, one is 40mm, one is 44mm). Battery life has largely remain the same, more than a day of use (est. 1.5 day) before charge, with only 1 change in settings - enable noise monitoring.
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WasabiJim said:
My wife and I have the stainless steel series 4. Her battery life is terrible after updating. She puts in on at 6am and by 5pm her watch is dead. Mine with that same time period I'm only down to 60%. Something is definitely wrong with the software. She had turned on the new noise app so we thought it was that. After turning it off she is still seeing the same results. Hope Apple fixes this soon.
Click to expand...

Tried a hard reset?

I think it may not be due to WatchOS 6 cause during beta testing of iOS 13.x while I have no access to WatchOS 6 betas, I did experience something to this effect of excessive drain. I cannot recall what I did and it stopped the excessive draining since and now on official WatchOS 6 (as well as official iOS 13.1.2 for iPhone X), I have not seen excessive drain anymore. Based on the brief encounter during beta testing, I suspect something to do with link between iPhone and Watch (perhaps the Analystics will the iPhone keeps pulling from the Watch, perhaps something else. Didn't manage to narrow down what it was. I did a hard reset on both iPhone X and Watch S4 SS back then).
 
Updated basic S4 to 6.0.1 yesterday. I put it on at 6am, and now at 6:20pm it's at 84%.

Seems to be dropping 1.3% per hour (desk job + a few errands). That seems about right.
 
I just started getting this problem today with my cellular Series 4. The screen gets very bright at times, and then returns to normal. I have had this watch since the Series 4 was released, and rarely was under 75% battery at the end of the day. Today was the first time I got a reserve power message. Picture attached.
 

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My series 4 has been trash since the update. I took my watch off the charger at 6 am yesterday and by 7pm it was completely dead.
 
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