Have had it now since launch and I am getting a solid 2 days out of it with AOD, workouts, sleep, and mid-brightness. I got a fast charging stand and I just drop it on for 30 mins when I'm working so not a big issue.
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Ultra 3 Battery Life = Only 24 hours?
- Thread starter robgreene
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Wow 60 is great. Are you having LTE on? I’m on 48 hours with 5% left with AOD on and LTE on and used when running and leaving my phone behind.
48 hours is great for me with around an hour daily run and all features I like turned on
20% sounds insane - mine use under 5% for a full night at the moment. My old Ultra 1 was closer to 10-12%
Yeah, it was. Went back to the Apple store and had a new one within about 5 minutes! Now get ~48 hours out of it if i need to with about 3 hours of workout (1 cellular) a day. Losing about the same as you during sleep now, and i tend to charge when in the shower so don't really think about battery anymore!
I have AOD on about half the time (during the day), with background app refresh off, no noise measurements. I don't really use 3rd party apps / complications either, apart from Windy in my smart stack for weather radar.
Nice - great you got a swap in store. Sounds like you have way better battery life now. 48 hours with 2-3 hours GPS in total here was with 5% left on the charge - And that is great to me
Was within 14 days, so they had no issues. 48h is fine to me too. I could probably get more if i go into low power mode, but if i'm going to be in the mountains for a few days or more, i'd probably take the garmin! SUper happy with the AWU and i love not needing to have my phone on me.
That is the killer feature for me during marathon training as well. Going on long runs and not having to bring my phone and still be able to call home if I fall or something is good - For the family to be able to reach me as well is also amazing.
If 48 hours is with everything on, then low power mode should give us double that? Would actually be fun to test out.
Apple's tech spec says 42 hours without low power mode and 72 hours with low power mode, so that implies if the watch actually gets 48 without low power mode then with low power mode it would extend it to 82 hours.
Low power mode could work here, but it’s how much it limits the health tracking / gps during the activity and how necessary this is for you during training. I’m fine with just the watch if running for 3 / 4 hours, and we can stretch this out by passing the heart rate monitoring off to a chest and/or bicep solution.
What I really want is to be confident in the device in an unsupported ultra (excuse the pun) setting, where I don’t have to lug a dumb phone or sat phone with me, but without SiC batteries or more efficient hardware, I understand this isn’t possible. It’ll come, but the question is when!
If I'm sat at the office doing very little, even with AOD on, I see an approx drain of anywhere from 1-1.6%/h depending what’s going on in there. In low power from the limited times I’ve used it have been getting around 0.8-1.3%/h off it. All we need to hit the 82 hour mark is an average drain of just over 1.2%h. Definitely possible if you aren’t getting 5G involved. Drain is higher when moving, and i don't feel like sitting at a desk for 82 hours. Might give LPM a run over the winter and make a thread, we'll see!
Edit: Some caveats on the battery figures I posted above, I do not have background app refresh on, nor do i have the noise warnings / decibel meters on. Walkie talkie is also disabled and I have only Imessage / urgent notifs come through. Only third party app is 'Windy' in my smart stack, that i often don't interact with if i have another device nearby (which at work is pretty much always!).
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I have just been to the Dolomites and hiked a lot with some days extending almost 8 hours with GPS and everything on. By turning low power mode on, many could stretch the Apple Watch batteries quite a lot - and it still gets full GPS/heart rate. It does limit some push notifications and think it turns off LTE etc.
So my sports side would be fine I think, but all the rest of the day it limits the HRV tracking etc. so I don't do it, but would be a fun test.
I did a 65K Hike last year and turned low power mode on, but had full GPS/heart rate on my Ultra 1 - it was 13 hours I think and it did great and if I remember correctly we came back with 15% battery after 13 hours on an older watch.