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7 Ways to Improve Apple Watch Battery Life
Apr 30, 2024
If it seems like the battery on your Apple Watch isn't lasting as long as it should, you're not alone. These 7 tips can help you maximize your Apple Watch battery life - hopefully without the need to pick up a new Watch. More Apple news: http://www.cultofmac.com Follow Ian! Twitter: https://twitter.com/ianfuchs Instagram: https://instagram.com/IanRedFox Follow us! Twitter: https://twitter.com/cultofmac Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cultofmac Instagram: https://instagram.com/cultofmac/
View Video Transcript
0:00
What's going on everybody, Ian here for Growth of Mac
0:08
And if you guys are anything like me, you want the most battery life out of your Apple
0:11
Watch so you can do the most with it. And while most Apple Watches have no problem lasting, you know, from when you wake up in
0:18
the morning until when you go to bed in the evening, if you want to use it for things like sleep tracking or extended workouts or anything like that, having a little bit of
0:25
extra battery life can be really important. There's a few really key tricks to getting better battery life out of your device if
0:31
you're having a hard time making it through a full 24 hours
0:35
The first step on the list is to make sure your Apple Watch software is fully up to date
0:39
Now especially when you have big point releases like watchOS 7 that just happened or watchOS
0:43
6 last year, anything like that, those big point releases tend to have some bugs and
0:47
little glitches in them early on that kind of make the battery life not so great
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So make sure your Apple Watch is up to date and on the latest version. A lot of times that will solve any battery life issues you're having
0:59
Now if your watch is fully up to date, another thing to do is just restart your Apple Watch
1:03
and restart your iPhone that's paired to the watch. Sometimes something gets caught up in the background, a process is kind of hung up
1:10
you know, either in a sync between the two or something running on the watch gets a little bit hung up and just rebooting both devices can take care of any weird, you know, kind
1:18
of battery drain sync issues that are happening and solve a weird battery draining problem
1:23
Now I've personally found it really helpful to just restart my watch every couple days, restart my phone at the same time, because then everything just seems to work a little
1:29
bit better. Another thing you can try is to start taming the notifications on your device so you're
1:34
actually looking at the device a little less frequently. If every single alert from every app on your phone is also waking up your watch, causing
1:43
you to look at your watch, you're waking up the screen more often, the haptics are running more often, the sound is possibly playing more often, and those are all things that
1:49
are going to drain down on the battery. So by going into the Apple Watch app and actually just turning off notifications for apps that
1:55
you don't need notifications for on your wrist, you can potentially save a bunch of battery
2:00
life without much difficulty. Now one of the biggest culprits for battery life drain for me personally in the past has
2:07
been some weird kind of buggy apps that I've put on my Apple Watch
2:12
Specifically apps that tend to want to use either your health data or your location data
2:17
or something that's constantly refreshing or trying to keep data up to date in the background
2:21
Those can actually put a pretty big strain on the battery of your Apple Watch
2:24
That's because they're constantly communicating across to the phone, constantly trying to get new information to display that for you
2:31
And in doing that, they're going to just drain more battery because they're actively working
2:34
in the background. By going into the Apple Watch app and turning off or uninstalling or removing those apps
2:39
from your watch, you're not going to have that excess drain on the watch for apps that
2:43
you're never going to use there anyway. Another thing that can really put a toll on your Apple Watch's battery is the fact that
2:49
Siri is always there and listening. By turning off either the Raise to Speak or even the Hey Siri thing on your Apple Watch
2:58
those can both save on battery because the microphones aren't constantly listening for
3:02
you to start speaking. The one that I found the most draining on the battery is the Raise to Speak feature
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because every time you flip your watch over, it starts listening for you to say the wake
3:10
word and that can put a little bit of a strain on the battery of your watch
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off, I saw about a 7 or 8% difference over the course of a day, which may not sound like
3:20
a lot, but that could be the difference between making it to the end of the day and not making
3:24
it to the end of the day. So by turning off that Raise to Speak feature, you can save a little bit of battery life
3:29
And if you really want to get crazy about it, you can also turn off the Hey incantation
3:34
to even tame back even more and you can still summon Siri by just pressing on the digital crown
3:40
Now another feature you could turn off if you were looking to save some battery life is the Always-on Display feature
3:46
And this only applies to the Apple Watch Series 5 and Series 6 owners
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But for those of you who are having a little bit of a battery issue, you may not need to
3:53
have the actual display always on, especially if you're trying to maximize your battery life
3:59
In turning off the Always-on Display, you can save 20 to 30% of your battery life every
4:03
day, which is a huge, huge difference. Now the final way that can possibly fix your battery life on your Apple Watch, if none
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of those other tricks work, is the option that none of us really want to do
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And that's to actually fully reset and unpair your watch and then pair it back up with your phone
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In doing this, any kind of weird cruft or stuff that's happened in the background between
4:25
those two devices is completely reset. Everything starts from scratch. You can either restore from a backup if you want, or possibly even start fresh on your
4:34
Apple Watch, which gives you the best chance of maximizing your battery life
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It is worth noting that those first couple days after you do a reset, battery life may
4:43
not be better because it's still kind of finalizing some things. But assuming that everything goes well, your battery life should improve after a full reset
4:53
Now if resetting your watch and trying every single one of those features makes no difference at all in your Apple Watch's battery life, it's definitely time to contact Apple and
5:00
see if there's something that they can do to help. There's no guarantee that they'll do anything other than recommend you buy a new battery
5:07
or buy a new Apple Watch, but it's worth contacting them anyway just to see if there's anything
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they can do. Hopefully this was helpful to you guys. Let me know what you think in the comments down below
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While you're down there, give the video a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel if you're not already
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And until next time, I'm Ian for Kulta Mac. I'll catch you in the next one
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