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Series 2 Watch display jumps around as though the Digital Crown is being turned

darkpaw

darkpaw

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 13, 2007
775
1,491
London, England
Apple Watch Series 2, Gold Aluminium, 42mm.

Was on watchOS 5, and started exhibiting this weird behaviour where the display would act as though you'd turned the Digital Crown to scroll when you actually hadn't. Because of this, the battery runs down very quickly, and it's difficult to use the Watch.

I just managed to upgrade it to watchOS 5.3.7, and then immediately to watchOS 6.2.5, but the behaviour remains, so it's unlikely to be a software issue.

I've tried to clean the Digital Crown, as suggested on an Apple page somewhere, but to no avail. It's still doing it.

Was there a hardware defect with this model of Watch? Some sort of known repair program I can use? It's no longer under warranty.

Thanks.
 
firedept said:
Just a quick thought. I'm sure you tried already. Hard reset?
Click to expand...
The Watch had been powered down for a couple of weeks, because it keeps running the battery down. Wouldn't a hard reset be performed as part of the two software updates I did?

EDIT: Nope. No change.
 
Last edited:
I had this happen to my series 0 many years ago. I believe it was moisture inside the Watch. Had it in the hot tub for 15 min. It acted weird for two days so I left it on the charger for 24 hours. After that it was normal again. I’m guessing the heat made the moisture dissipate.
 
darkpaw said:
Apple Watch Series 2, Gold Aluminium, 42mm.

Was on watchOS 5, and started exhibiting this weird behaviour where the display would act as though you'd turned the Digital Crown to scroll when you actually hadn't. Because of this, the battery runs down very quickly, and it's difficult to use the Watch.

I just managed to upgrade it to watchOS 5.3.7, and then immediately to watchOS 6.2.5, but the behaviour remains, so it's unlikely to be a software issue.

I've tried to clean the Digital Crown, as suggested on an Apple page somewhere, but to no avail. It's still doing it.

Was there a hardware defect with this model of Watch? Some sort of known repair program I can use? It's no longer under warranty.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

This is definitely hardware related, not software. My guess, is one of the attached ‘digitizer ribbons‘ is loose causing the display to distort. This is only a repair that Apple could look into.
 
I had the same thing happen to my SBSS Series 2 last week. Like you I tried all the cleaning routines, hard resets, unpair, repair, etc. etc. Nothing made it any better and mine is so bad that I can't fully charge the watch anymore. It's out of the warranty period, so it would be $249 for Apple to "repair" per their repair cost chart. (https://support.apple.com/watch/repair/service/pricing)

I found a Series 5 SBSS locally at Best Buy that was on sale last week($110 off MSRP), so I chose to upgrade rather than repair.
 
I gave my son my old SS S2 in perfect working order about a month later he was complaining that his music volume playing through Air Pods would randomly turn up and down... Long story short we've done everything we could do without taking it in for repair, which from the chart above that wouldn't be worth it to have fixed. Sucks because it was $800 bucks new!
 
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