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APPLE
Is Apple Making a Big Mistake with Apple Watch Battery life?
I think they could be missing an opportunity here
My sister recently acquired a Timex smartwatch. It doesn’t begin to have the capabilities of my Apple Watch, but for the price, it’s a useful device. There is one area where it beats my watch hands down: battery life.
Seven days
My sister is charging this once a week. I charge my watch every day, twice a day if I’m exercising heavily.
I have heard many people say they will not consider an Apple Watch because of battery life. Most, though not all, do understand that the reason for the Apple Watch needing more power is its advanced features and its sampling rate: it’s reading data more frequently and analyzing it more deeply.
For me, that’s worth having to charge more often. I usually charge while I shower and if I have to charge before bed, I do it while watching TV. Sure, I’d rather do that once a week, but it’s not possible.
Power reserve
Power Reserve mode mostly disables the Apple Watch, showing only the time. You can enable that by swiping up, clicking on the battery icon, and choosing Power Reserve. That’s drastic; I have rarely used it.
What if you could choose what to disable? What if you could reduce the sampling rate?
We have something similar to that on other devices: Low Power mode reduces how frequently your device checks for new email, background app activity, and other power consuming activities. Apple Watch could have a similar setting to increase battery life.
Let the user choose
Or Apple could give the user full control over everything. Suppose you don’t feel the need to constantly monitor your heart rate when not doing a workout? Letting you set that to monitor for a few minutes every hour only would reduce battery usage.
Maybe some people would shut off some functions entirely. You can shut off fall detection now; why not extend that choice to all functions?
I don’t know how much battery this would save. If it could be a significant amount, Apple should…
