New York Times blogger Brian X. Chen asked Tim Cook about the Apple Watch and battery life. Tim’s reply:
“I don’t think we skipped over it. I addressed it in the presentation myself. We think that based on our experience of wearing these that the usage of them will be really significant throughout the day. So we think you’ll want to charge them every night, similar to what a lot of people do with their phone.”
As I said in last week’s piece on the Apple Watch:
Charging is done via induction and requires a special cable. If life between charges is long enough (say, at least 24 hours), that shouldn’t be an issue. No doubt, someone will create a brick capable of charging both your phone and watch about the size of existing iPhone/iPad charging bricks. Keep one in your backpack or your pocket and you’ll always have a charging solution.
Charging at night seems about right. I don’t think it is reasonable to have the same expectation for Apple Watch battery life as I do for my wristwatch. This is a new type of device, more functionally aligned with my phone than with my simple watch.
Charging my Watch at night is no different to me than charging my computer or my iPhone. There is the added strain on the power grid that this brings, but that’s a different story altogether.
The problem with charging at night is that the Apple Watch can’t record and analyze your sleeping cycles. It also can’t wake you up at the right time, which would be a really nice feature. A lot of fitness trackers offer this feature. A lot of interesting health and fitness data is not collected, because the Apple Watch is on the table next to you charging.
It performs all functionality while charging just like anything else does.
Saying you’ll want to charge every night tells you nothing about the battery life of the watch. A watch that lasts, say, 10 hours would also need to be charged every night, but would be a terrible battery life for a watch. I’m sure they’ll have numbers for us when they get closer to the release date.
No, it can’t measure your sleep quality when you’re not wearing it, nor can it use vibration to wake you up. (Why would you want it to do that? To avoid disturbing a partner, for example.)
You would go so far as ‘sleeping’ with the Watch :-0
(sorry for the stupid pun)
But seriously, you would consider sleeping with a watch? I never do that, but maybe I’m a special snowflake…
Given the lack of specific information about the battery, as well as the sensors, my impression is the Watch is not finished yet. That’s not a problem for their delivery schedule, but it explains why Apple is being cagey about certain aspects.
Ben,
Have you used the Jawbone UP? The sleep functionality was hands down my favorite part. Measuring your sleep cycles, waking you at the optimal time in the morning, and power naps (there is an app for this on iPhone) were incredibly useful features that became my primary reason for using the UP even though I originally bought it to monitor fitness activity. The problem with the UP band is it’s terribly unreliable (I’ve had 5 of them die and have given up using one), and so I was really hopeful the Watch could replace it permanently. Lack of sleep monitoring is a big disappointment.
BTW: Unless you’ve used something like the UP band to do what Ben described, you simply won’t “get” why this is a big miss for the Watch.
Buy two. Just kidding of course.
Thing is though it’s not technically the iWatch that’s capturing the data, it’s the Healthbook app on your iPhone. So if you have a supported tracker just put that on at night and the data gets merged.
Granted it’s hardly an ideal solution but I’m not sure how you get around it. You’ve gotta charge the watch at some point after all. For fitness trackers it’s relatively straightforward, just put it on charge when you get home and aren’t doing much. For a smart watch however you’re more likely to want to use it during that period (say remote controlling your aTV for instance) so the only downtime is when you’re asleep.
Apple generally gives specific numbers on battery time when they have them, though it would be a tough number to nail down this early because the usage pattern for this device isn’t really known yet. They currently get “about a day,” which is about as specific as anyone else is getting with any smart watch right now.
I suspect that in the coming months Apple will be developing the finishing touches on the OS with an eye toward squeezing as much additional battery life as they can out of it. When the watch is finally available, I suspect it will see battery life that exceeds what the other players in the game launched with.
IMO Nightly charging is a problem, and if the watch makes it to further incarnations I suspect 2-3 days which is more reasonable.
I think people who want to wear it at night will find a 1-2 hr. gap somewhere in their day to fully charge the watch. This is a minor “problem”. No wearable can be worn 365/24/7. Whether it’s every 1 or 2 or 3 days, you still need to part with it to recharge.
The Apple Watch looks easy to remove and the MagSafe charging is simple enough. I could see myself charging it a couple of times each day (during shower/toiletries or stuck at a desk). But each person will figure out their individual routine.
He says charge “every night,” not overnight. Just charge it for a couple hours during dinner/tv time. when you’re sedentary anyhow, then wear it to bed.
My wife charges her iPhone at work, but not on the weekends (causing her to run out on 3-day weekends). I charge mine all the time. I expect the Apple Watch battery life to show similar flexibility based on usage.
I think the bigger question is how long it takes to charge. As a point of size reference, iPod shuffle takes 2 hours for 80%, 4 hours for 100%, presumably on 5W USB. The Apple Watch uses induction, which is usually slower than conductive, but we don’t know how many watts it can handle. 1-hour charge twice daily will be more convenient for some people than an 8-hour charge once daily.
It’s unreasonable to expect otherwise. How do you want such a device to charge? Motion? Solar? If you wear it 24 hours when do you charge it?
Want to analyze your sleep cycle for a week? Charge it when you get up, or over lunch, or in the evening before you go to bed.
Maybe you’ll be able to buy a dongle that you attach to your body at night, and it talks to your phone all through the night as it charges.
Like they said, the list of things it can do is long, but once people get their hands on it, they will think of an even longer list.
Okay, now to get a patent application going…
What’s a miss is people expecting it to be a perpetual motion machine.
Technically (pedantically?) it’s an Apple Watch. It is not an iWatch.
If the battery performance is like the iPhone, then there’s a problem. Let’s face it, many people need to charge their smartphones (no matter which one you have) more than once a day. Some people would deny this. But this is simply true for many people who put their phones to serious use.
Bottom line – whoever cracks this battery performance problem first will win the smart devices industry – like that.
“but would be a terrible battery life for a watch…”
I’d agree – if this was just a watch. People keep comparing the (unknown) battery life of the Apple Watch to that of a “regular” watch. But the Apple Watch is more like “an iPhone on your wrist”. And most of us (sadly) need to charge our iPhones every evening. So doing the same with the Apple Watch really shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.
“Apple Watch can’t record and analyze your sleeping cycles.”
It’s not designed to nor did Apple ever say it would.
Now that would be cool and real game changer!
They haven’t said it, but they haven’t said anything about a lot of things it looks like it will be able to do. Any what else would the pink icon with “Zzz” on it be? http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1777977
Sorry, purple icon that is.
The difference between my iPhone and the Apple Watch is that I can also charge the iPhone on my desk at work. I really hope it will be able to run for two days on a charge, to handle the case of forgetting to charge it one night.
a silent alarm that doesnt bother your partner sounds neat.
Kip’s point stands — sleep functionality is a reasonable and desired feature set. one we were hoping for, too.
dont really want to charge it while at my desk because one of the use cases is tracking my time sitting at a desk, and generating alerts for standing/walking goals.
regardless of whether apple ever said it would, analyzing sleep behavior is a popular use case among competing fitness-minded wearables. of course one is going to bring it up when discussing apple’s entry into the same space.
when i compared my nokia candybar to the first iphone i thought the same. but we got over it, because there isnt any alternatives — mature battery technology sucks. theres nothing on the immediate horizon, either.
ive never had to charge my phone more than once a day. sometimes not even once a day.
sounds like you may need a battery case.
Perhaps but then you could bring up all kinds of things the Apple Watch doesn’t/won’t do. There’s no point in going down that rabbit hole.
That being said, at some point in the future, I believe the Apple Watch will do what you suggest.
Granted, but my spouse sleeps like a rock that even bouncing kids can’t seem to wake up… so I’ve got different priorities.
Since exactly “0” of the current smart watches released have this functionality and “all” of them require overnight recharge, “reasonable” might be incorrect. Also, Jawbone announced that they would open up their ecosystem to other devices including Apple Watch so you might not want to give up on the UP just yet.
No doubt it would be great. But expecting it to have battery life good enough for 24/7 wear is not realistic at this point. Not for a watch that does what it does.
So yes, it is a point that would be great to have, but unrealistic expectations for it to happen now are not Apple’s fault.
“There is the added strain on the power grid that this brings, but that’s a different story altogether.”
Strain on the grid? Not if we’re talking about overnight charging. The grid’s capacity is vastly underused in the overnight hours.
This is why many love the idea of plug-in electric vehicles that are set to charge overnight. It makes more efficient use of the electrical capacity of the current grid that otherwise goes unused during those hours.
Similar ideas been tinkered with in developing electric cooling/heating systems that run harder during the overnight hours to create a store of heat or a lack thereof to release during times when electricity is otherwise in greater demand.
(I know, I’m going on about what was pretty much a throw-away line in the story)
Has everyone forgotten about clocks and watches that had to be manually wound? (one of the original uses for the crown other than setting the time)
We’ve been spoiled by electricity.