Why isn't 802.11ac WiFi supported?

[lockerc18]

Battery life? Something else? It seems a shame to spend all this money and be limited on WiFi performance.

 

[Vanilla35]

Probably cost more. Not likely to see the benefit from it either.

 

[Lennyvalentin]

It seems a shame to spend all this money and be limited on WiFi performance.

TLR - cost, space requirements, power draw, viability. Maybe more stuff as well.

AC is a more complex tech, requires more circuitry, possibly also more antennas, more signal processing, leading to higher battery consumption and difficulty to fit into an already cramped device.

Besides, what are you going to download to the watch that is that space consuming that you need faster wifi? Even though wOS 5 supports limited web surfing it will still be limited, and you're not going to download huge files to your watch either. Anyway, since no watch thus far has supported 5GHz wifi bands you probably wouldn't get much higher performance with AC anyway; 2.4GHz band is often very crowded.