Many Apple Watch wearers suffered from shortened battery lives after upgrading to watchOS 10, but the problem will be taken care of soon with a software patch, according to an internal Apple document.
While not affecting everyone with an Apple Watch, this a clearly a significant problem, considering the number of complaints about it online.
watchOS 10 drains Apple Watch battery
The September release of watchOS 10 brought widget support, revamped system apps and plenty of other new features and changes. But a further update caused problems for some Apple Watch users.
A discussion thread on Apple’s support site titled “Apple Watch Battery Drain Issues after Update has thousands of “Me too” upvotes. “Since updating to WatchOS 10.0.1, the watch battery charges only to 80% overnight and the battery drains more quickly than before the update,” the Apple Watch user wrote.
And this is merely a single example — there are reports on other forums as well.
Complaints of battery drain immediately after a major system software update are not unusual. But this time the problem isn’t going away on its own, as usually happens.
A variety of Apple Watch models seem to be affected.
Please stand by for an Apple Watch update
Fortunately, a fix is on the way. An update to watchOS is “coming soon” to deal with the problem, according to an Apple memo leaked to MacRumors.
The release of the patch could come as early as this week. The last update was watchOS 10.1 on October 25.
Ed Hardy has been writing full-time about tech for 25 years, and using it for much longer than that. His intro to Apple was a Macintosh Classic II (which he still has), but now he uses a 13-inch iPad Pro as his primary computer. He’s written for NotebookReview, TabletPCReview, and Brighthand, as well as other sites.
