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Terrible battery life

deeddawg said:
So the implication is you think the substantially lower battery life on the S5 vs S6 is normal and to be expected.

What do you say to those stating they've seen a substantial improvement with 6.1 beta?
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Not sure what you mean by S5 vs S6.

I don’t say anything. I’m simply pointing out that Apple in no way mentioned among their other vivid detail that AOD was enabled during their 18 hour standards testing. Maybe it was, and maybe it wasn’t.

Just like I don’t say to myself or others that Apple messed up with “up to” 18 hour claims given that many of us get many more hours with earlier devices or OS’s.

In my own light use testing after changing one thing at a time, I’ve shown that AOD enabled on my S5 device will prevent 18 hour life with my lighter use, let alone the use they did in their tests—don’t forget—with “preproduction” software.

I hope 6.0.1 or 6.1 does lengthen life with AOD on for the majority of users.
 
Maybe I’m lucky, but S5 battery has been the same as I had with S4. I charge the watch before going to sleep, usually between 9-10 PM. Today I woke up with 90% left. AutoSleep/AutoWake were doing their thing overnight. Ended the day with 40% left at 9 PM, which would leave about 25-30% for tomorrow, if I wouldn’t charge. But now it’s charging for an hour before bedtime. As usual.

There was no excercise today, but there were a number of different watch faces and complications in constant use, and a continuous flow of notifications.

The S5 was initially restored from an iCloud backup, with the S4 also running WatchOS 6 GM.

I haven’t turned off any features, except ”auto-connect to threadmills” ... or whatever that gym feature is called :). It was a battery hog during the 2017 or 2018 beta cycle, and I never re-enabled it.
 
Ok just done a 40 min workout

Dropped 15% in that time and now it’s 30% left at 19.20pm

I don’t want to switch off AOD as that’s main difference in upgrading
 
BillGates1969 said:
Weird.

Today I stopped stressing about the battery and left AOD on and just used it as normal. So far 13 hrs standby and still 70% battery.

AW5 44mm LTE.
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Yea at the end of day, I stopped worrying about it because even with AOD On, my watch battery goes from 100% to around 50% before I take it off. So as long as it doesn't die on me at the end of the day. I'm good. But I'm really hoping for 6.1
 
Lobwedgephil said:
He thinks the AOD is about 30% a day, from my usage it seems more like 10% a day worse than the Series 4, I keep everything on.
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I'm clipping out the photo you linked for brevity, but... in Marques' case, I'd question whether the battery life issue was related to a couple of those complications - workout and heart rate. Before I turned off the always-on display, I'd suggest test removal of various complications (and also docked apps) and disabling most background tasks. It made quite a difference for me.

I've left the always-on display on, and I've got raise to wake enabled. By the end of the day (generally 18 hour days for me, yes I don't get enough sleep) I'm pretty consistently between 40 and 50 percent on the battery. I'd like to see it better but I can live with this.

Currently I'm back to the old Modular face, with date, calendar, temp, activity, and breathe complications. When I was using Infograph the battery life was a bit worse, but I was still ending the day above 30%.

Now if the "problem" complications are important to you, then yes return the watch - it's not serving your needs. But for me, I find there aren't that many I actually end up using once I'm past the "ooh, new shiny" stage.
 
Chiming in again with my SBSS 44mm on OS6: I was able to go almost a day and a half between charges. Took the watch off the charger at 9PM on 9/25. Put the watch back on a charger at almost 7AM today 9/27. Nearly 34 hours usage.

Odds and Ends:

Noise = off
AOD = on
Background App Refresh = on
Raise to Wake = off
Brightness = Lowest (still plenty bright enough for me)

Accumulated 40 minutes worth of workout time (Outdoor Walk), notifications for numerous texts, fb messenger messages, listened to a little bit of music during my walks. Did not put my watch into theater mode during both nights sleep.

Works out to be an average of almost 3% drain/hour. Pretty satisfied with these kind of results.
 
Aetherhole said:
Chiming in again with my SBSS 44mm on OS6: I was able to go almost a day and a half between charges. Took the watch off the charger at 9PM on 9/25. Put the watch back on a charger at almost 7AM today 9/27. Nearly 34 hours usage.

Odds and Ends:

Noise = off
AOD = on
Background App Refresh = on
Raise to Wake = off
Brightness = Lowest (still plenty bright enough for me)

Accumulated 40 minutes worth of workout time (Outdoor Walk), notifications for numerous texts, fb messenger messages, listened to a little bit of music during my walks. Did not put my watch into theater mode during both nights sleep.

Works out to be an average of almost 3% drain/hour. Pretty satisfied with these kind of results.
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When my Series 5 comes in I plan on turning off raise to wake; seems like thats the behavior I’d want - when I want to wake it up fully just tap the screen or rotate the crown. Otherwise all the info I need is always showing; and I’m sure there are significant battery increases that way and that thing where you think you raise your wrist but you dont never happens because you always tap or rotate the crown.

How has turning off raise to wake been for you?
 
musicpenguy said:
When my Series 5 comes in I plan on turning off raise to wake; seems like thats the behavior I’d want - when I want to wake it up fully just tap the screen or rotate the crown. Otherwise all the info I need is always showing; and I’m sure there are significant battery increases that way and that thing where you think you raise your wrist but you dont never happens because you always tap or rotate the crown.

How has turning off raise to wake been for you?
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If you turn off raise to wake you will be looking at a shrunken down, very dimmed version of your watch face. When AOD is on, the watch face dims and shrinks down when activated. I couldn't deal with constantly touching it every time I wanted to see something other than the time on the watch.
 
Donnation said:
If you turn off raise to wake you will be looking at a shrunken down, very dimmed version of your watch face. When AOD is on, the watch face dims and shrinks down when activated. I couldn't deal with constantly touching it every time I wanted to see something other than the time on the watch.
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What do you mean shrinks down? I used it in the Apple Store and it seemed to just dim, but very readable to my eyes. I guess I will see in a couple days if I opt for that strategy. My series 4 behavior was using the crown to turn on the screen - that was what I did quite a bit, I did have raise to wake on as well, but not sure its needed as much anymore.
 
musicpenguy said:
What do you mean shrinks down? I used it in the Apple Store and it seemed to just dim, but very readable to my eyes. I guess I will see in a couple days if I opt for that strategy. My series 4 behavior was using the crown to turn on the screen - that was what I did quite a bit, I did have raise to wake on as well, but not sure its needed as much anymore.
Click to expand...

Many of the watch faces shrink down in size slightly when the display dims.
 
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So far on my S5 44mm cellular with 6.1 beta, AOD on, app background refresh on, raise to wake on, noise app off and 75% brightness (two bars in watch settings). I'm at 2hrs 40min usage and 14hrs 13mins standby with 56% battery left. Pretty happy with that.
 
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Radeon85 said:
So far on my S5 44mm cellular with 6.1 beta, AOD on, app background refresh on, raise to wake on, noise app off and 75% brightness (two bars in watch settings). I'm at 2hrs 40min usage and 14hrs 13mins standby with 56% battery left. Pretty happy with that.
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S5 OS6 50% usage 1:57, standby 09:19. Not happy. may be 6.1 really helps?

09:19x2 more than 18 hours.
 
Donnation said:
I’ve had mine off the charger since 7am. Did a 90 minute workout and it’s already down to 67% at 12:15. This won’t last until this evening at this rate. Hope it improves as I’m hoping everything is still syncing from the backup. If not, Always On will be shut off and this upgrade will have been a complete waste.
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Since updating iPhone to iOS 13.1.1 I’m seeing better battery life on Series 5 Watch.
 
The problem is, people are expecting the S5 to last as long as the S4, and it just wont with AOD on it stands to reason.
If this was the first AW and Apple said 18 hrs life then nobody would be complaining. It’s doing what Apple said it will do. They never said it will match the S4
 
UKapple73 said:
The problem is, people are expecting the S5 to last as long as the S4, and it just wont with AOD on it stands to reason.
If this was the first AW and Apple said 18 hrs life then nobody would be complaining. It’s doing what Apple said it will do. They never said it will match the S4
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Mine doesn’t meet what Apple says. The best it managed to do was 8 hours (no workout, phone always in reach). If it did what Apple says I would be happy, because I could manage a normal day.
 
UKapple73 said:
The problem is, people are expecting the S5 to last as long as the S4, and it just wont with AOD on it stands to reason.
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You're making the assumption that any power efficiency improvements in the S5 fail to offset the increased power usage of the display. I'm not sure that's necessarily a valid assumption.

Maybe they don't. Maybe they do. We don't have sufficient facts to answer the question at this time.

They never said it will match the S4
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Apple quoted the same 18 hour battery life for the S4 that they quote for the S5.

That's going to lead people to expect similar battery performance.
 
deeddawg said:
Apple quoted the same battery life for the S4 that they quote for the S5.
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To be fair, every Watch had a quoted battery life of 18 hours. If the (my) S5 would meet that, I would not quite be happy, because my S3 gets a lot more. But technically I couldn’t complain. The reality is, with no measures whatsoever I am able to get these 18 hours.
 
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