You know how there are non smart watches that can last up to a decade on one battery and it doesn't have to be replaced for a long time? Well why can't Apple create a smartwatch that can last as long as a non smartwatch?
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Why doesn't Apple make a watch that last up to ten years on a non rechargable battery
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It sounds like you have an idea. A smart watch that lasts as long as non smart watches. Hurry up and get it on paper because you’re going to be rich!
Please compare battery consumption for a simple mechanical watch which function is to show proper time only to the ones synchronizing, analyzing gyroscopes, data from multiple sensors and plotting stuff on screen.
People have problem with raw compare between Garmins, Amazfits etc to Apple but sensor readings quality and synchronization is way better on AW.
People have problem with raw compare between Garmins, Amazfits etc to Apple but sensor readings quality and synchronization is way better on AW.
The same reasons tire companies don't create a ten year tire, or car manufacturers build a car that lasts decades. They're in the business to sell, and repeat customers is a great way to keep sales going
Smart watches use more power than non-smart watches.
Iron Man's not real. Can't fit a fusion reactor into a smartwatch. The Apple Ultra can BARELY go 72 hours.
My Casio G-Shock tough solar laughs at a paltry 10 year battery life…. It lasts forever as long as it’s exposed a small amount of light of any type. If I go on a trip it’s my preference. Recently went on a trip to the other side of the globe and the Apple Watch battery died on the flight. (The lack of a good/cheap/convenient watch charger is a deterrent)
There are cheap AW chargers that are just a charging puck and USB plug without a cable. Add a small power bank and you’ll never have to worry about it again.
My Citizen watch, which has zero technology, never needs a charging cable or a new battery. It charges by light. Any light. Sunlight. Light from a lamp. Never dies.
Even if they could, they wouldn‘t.
Apple is maybe one of the greediest companies in the history of companies. They’ll never sacrifice the revenue from the churn.
Apple is maybe one of the greediest companies in the history of companies. They’ll never sacrifice the revenue from the churn.
Zero technology but charges by light?
Actually it will eventually need to have the capacitor replaced. Ditto G-Shock.
Not knocking. I have both Citizen and G-Shock and love both.
The issue has to do with battery technology and I'm not sure the battery technology is there yet.
Non-smart watches that can last a decade on one battery (I wonder if saying it goes for 1 decade is an exaggeration, but point taken that it lasts a long time) is because they use VERY little energy. Those watches are probably using button cell batteries because it doesn't need anything with more capacity than that.
With smart watches, energy consumption is higher and because battery capacity is not high when the physical size of the battery is small, it means the watch needs to be charged more frequently. More charges means more cycles. More cycles mean faster degradation of the battery.
I had a Series 4 Watch for 4 years and the battery capacity was still going quite well. I estimate that it at least has another 2 to 3 years, if not more. That's not bad for such a small battery and in which energy consumption is relatively high.
This is the sort of lazy cynicism that makes the whole internet so incredibly tiresome. A know-it-all tone of voice combined with (at times, wilful, at times just pure) ignorance regarding the specific topic at hand. Plus some ridiculous hyperbole, of course.
Because no, at this point in time and for the foreseeable future it is absolutely impossible to make a device like an Apple Watch run years (or months) on one battery (charge).
Every engineer out there laughing at this one.
All our chips are based on a process which involves shunting electrons around and holding onto them in certain places. When nothing is being moved around, little to no power is being used. When stuff is moving around, power is being used.
Traditional watches have dedicated counter circuits and logic which spends most of its time doing precisely nothing so virtually no energy is dissipated. They also don't have very many logic gates in them. A casio watch probably has max 500 gates or so in it. The same with the liquid crystal displays which are only periodically poked at by the driver circuits to keep them driven. The outcome is that the total power usage for an older digital watch is in the order of uA / nA which is easily supplied by very limited battery technology.
Smart watches of the current generation have BILLIONS of gates in them. They are fully blown computer systems. Thus they have billions of things moving around all the time dissipating power. A huge amount of software is written to avoid them doing work and burning this energy off. Also the OLED displays, unlike your old LCD watch, require power the entire time while being observed. Power management on these involves turning them on and off rapidly so that the total power dissipation is low. All these things shove the current requirements up to milliamp level and possibly total spikes in the order of amps.
Really a generic computing device will require orders of magnitude more power than a specialist device. That's not ever going to change.
We're crossing our fingers waiting for battery technology but even if it improves 4-fold which is actually unlikely in a 20 year window at this point, then you're not going to get anywhere near an old digital watch. You're going to have to charge stuff daily or at best every couple of days. It's not an unreasonable compromise considering the functional gain over an old digital watch.
Some trivia as well. I have an old HP 12C calculator. That has 3x LR44 batteries in it. They last up to a decade. The only way they managed to get that was to make the CPU in it using silicon on sapphire CMOS process which is the sort of thing they throw into space regularly and costs a lot of money. That was literally to stop the batteries draining when the device was not doing anything through leakage, another vampire power sucking bit of physics to contend with...
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