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Why did my Apple Watch battery tank hard today?

P

paulgandersman

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 4, 2010
162
59
So I have a SS Apple Watch and I've been getting excellent battery life on it. On days where I use it heavily (exercise, GPS, messages, emails, etc) I usually end the day throwing it on the charger at about 40% battery left. Well I've had it on my wrist today for about 10hrs and the battery is currently at 12%.... strange. especially since I have actually had a very light activity day. i've sat around the house all day and went to the store down the street once. not doing anything crazy on my iPhone either, no restores or resyncs or downloading any new apps or anything. just basic internet surfing and playing the occasional hearthstone. i've barely used my watch today.

any idea what's going on with it? (and it was at 100% when I took it off the charger this morning)
 
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That happened to me last week. I was just hanging out not doing much and noticed the battery was nearly drained by noon. I didn't do anything to troubleshoot it. I just let it drain and set it to charge at 10 percent then rebooted my phone. Next day, back to normal full day of use.
 
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Whoa, the same thing happened to me too! I've never gone past 30%, and today the watch warned me that I was at 10% after only 10 hours. What the...

I did turn on ATT wifi calling yesterday, which is the only change to my phone that I can think of.
 
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Happened to me this past week, too. Battery warning at 10% came up after 7 hours of wearing my watch. I rebooted the Watch immediately and it still died within an hour of reboot. I then put it on the charger till full and it's been fine since.

Probably something got stuck, but I had not used any third-party apps that day. Just weird...
 
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Check your usage. This happened to me a couple of weeks ago, and when I checked usage it said my watch had been active 7 hours of the total 7 since last charge. No idea what caused it. After recharging it was back to normal. Didn't even reboot.
 
mine just died after 4 hours sitting at work. i was like huh???? tried to check the usage before it died but not even that worked. gave me an error message but i got iMessages etc just fine so it wasnt a pairing issue


(i already un and repaired it cuz it sucked after the initial OS2 update as well)
 
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Using Shazaam for the first time (actually, a coupe of times) yesterday is the only thing that I can think of that I did differently, so maybe that app stuck on me? My wife also used it for the first time yesterday, and she had no issues (our Watches are essentially setup exactly the same.) I didn't use any other 3rd party apps.
 
Had that happen last week. Out of the blue battery discharge. Watch restarted after a charge and hasn't happened since. I am leaving open the possibility that in my case something prevented it from charging (loose plug, improperly connected puck, etc). I rarely check the battery level as I never need to. In this case, maybe I left my house with it at half charge to begin with. I'll keep an eye out to see if it occurs again.
 
WilliamG said:
Happened to me this past week, too. Battery warning at 10% came up after 7 hours of wearing my watch. I rebooted the Watch immediately and it still died within an hour of reboot. I then put it on the charger till full and it's been fine since.

Probably something got stuck, but I had not used any third-party apps that day. Just weird...
Click to expand...
Happened to me today after 7 hours. I did update to OS 2 this weekend and I didn't check the battery level this morning to see if it just wasn't seated on the charger.
 
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My battery died today too. I've run it down to empty once before but when that happened I was doing something that activated the face repeatedly so it made sense. Today was a normal day and I didn't start a workout (which I often do for the walking parts of my commute) so, if anything, less watch activity than normal. It's charging now; it feels a bit slower to charge than normal but that might be me imagining things!
 
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I posted this in another thread, but it seems more fitting here, so I'll paste here too:

I had a horrible battery day today, never had this happen before. Normally I don't even pay attention to the battery since I still have around 30-40% left by bed time.

But today I woke up at ~4am, and my watch just died completely around 2:35pm. Not even 12 hours! Normal usage as far as I know (haven't even gone to work out yet). I'm guessing something was just going on in the background, like loading apps or transferring pictures or something. I'll check the Usage page in settings when I get home.
 
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Odd, this happened to me today. Usually after wearing the watch morning through bedtime, I have about 50-60% battery life left. But just now (7:30pm), I got a low battery warning.
 
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Same thing happened to me today also.
I turned my watch on at 4am at 100% and at
430am I already was down to 98% and
by 2pm I had 5% battery life left.
 
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thekayman said:
Check your usage. This happened to me a couple of weeks ago, and when I checked usage it said my watch had been active 7 hours of the total 7 since last charge. No idea what caused it. After recharging it was back to normal. Didn't even reboot.
Click to expand...
Had same thing happen,,been fine since..
 
Just had that happen to me earlier today! Normally my Watch is excellent on battery life. In fact, I've only gone below 40% one time since receiving my Watch on launch day. Today, however, was the first time I hit 10% and had to activate Power Reserve.

I don't understand why. My watch had been off the charger for about 25 hours, and was at exactly 50% when I put it on this morning. No problem! I only needed it to last me less than 6 hours before I'd be back home to charge it. A little after one hour after putting on my Watch, I received the 10% warning.

I didn't do anything different on my Watch that I don't normally do. A few time checks here and there, an occasional text received, and a progress update. Somehow, I lost 40% in just an hour. Very strange. Will see what happens tomorrow.
 
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I guess there is something to do about the Night Stand mode as I read from another post.
 
I'd like an option to actually see which apps are running on the Watch (via the Watch itself, preferably, or the phone), and to kill them individually. I've never gone down to the 10% level, but I noticed it draining very fast one day; seems that a recently updated app on my phone had a bew Watch app, and it was stuck installing. I rarely even look at the app home screen on the Watch, so I hadn't noticed the icon failing to load. An uninstall/reboot/install later and I was good to go.
 
And to add... mine just tanked today. Off charger at 7am and only got to 1pm. It was used in getting directions for my 2 hour drive, so I suspect Maps never closed down. Now on power reserve until I get home :(
 
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Same thing happened to me yesterday. I flew across a time zone, but that was the only thing out of the ordinary. Never been that low on battery that early before.
 
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UGH... Mine is doing this right now. Full charge took it off at 5:30 am, it is now 11:47 and I'm down to 28%. I cant even check usage, it says it is disconnected, but the watch says connected...
 
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Mine has done this twice since I upgraded to watch OS 2.0. I'm assuming that's the reason it's happened, as it never happened even once before and I've had mine since a couple days after launch. Both were on days that I didn't work out, so I should have ended the day with about 40-50% battery, but the watch died mid-afternoon.

If it happens again I asking Apple to explain or replace.
 
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