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Comment by sulam | Hacker News Reader

By adding GPS it seems like they're really doubling down on the ~1 day battery life, which is really annoying. And keep in mind it's not actually a full day if you _use_ the thing. For instance I was trying to compare a Fitbit Charge HR and the Apple Watch in terms of how they tracked my heart rate over a hike a couple months ago. It was an 8 mile loop with some good elevation gain -- took me maybe 4 hours. The Apple Watch died 3/4 of the way through the hike despite being fully charged that morning. The Charge HR has lasted 3 and 4 day trips to the Sierras with room to spare, and it's always capturing heart rate, whereas the Apple Watch is really only doing that when I tell it to.

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That's awful. I'm a Charge HR owner and I was considering the Nike Apple Watch (it looks so cool!) but if what you say about the battery life is true than the Apple Watch is completely off the table.

So you _can_ wear it on a hike, you just can't record the whole exercise. The Apple Watch samples your heart rate every 5 minutes or so normally. If you start recording an exercise, it samples much more frequently and also seems to do more communication with your phone. The end result is that any exercise that lasts a long time (hours) will drain the battery fiercely.

I go for a 7-mile walk (which takes ~2 hours) every day, however my Apple Watch tends to end my day with 40-50% battery remaining (last night it ended at 47%). This is with medium brightness, prominent haptic, email notifications limited to VIPs, and only a few third party apps installed. I also generally get few text messages, so appointment reminders and delivery notifications aside, the watch is fairly quiet for most of the day.

There was a period once where it was ending up at 5-10% at the end of the day, however that seemed to be the fault of some app in the background that was apparently thrashing. Powering off then re-powering on the watch got it back up to lasting ~1.5 - 1.8 days on a charge, and that's not recurred since.

That said, I'm also a bit disappointed that Apple isn't pushing for the watch to be able to last 2 to 2.5 days on a charge, to cover the occasional case where you forget to charge it one evening.

Do you actually start an exercise? My watch lasts all day consistently. It can't last all day (or even half a day) when doing whatever it does to record exercise.

I do start an exercise, yes.

Again, may be worth powering off then powering on the watch. In my case, again, something was clearly thrashing in the background and eating nearly an extra 40% of the maximum battery capacity over 16 hours. It's only happened once, but restarting the watch (in which presumably the process was killed then restarted) resolved the excessive power usage.

So far today I've been up since 6AM. It's 11 hours later. I've done a 7.2 mile walk (as an exercise). I have 69% of the battery remaining with another 6 to 7 waking hours left in my day.

This is not my experience at all. I put the watch down when I went to bed with a rather comstamt remaining charge of about 60% and to me it seems other users had similar experiences. Even Apple itself came to the conclusion that there's enough capacity left considering the changes in WatchOS 3.

Is there anything special about the hiking part of your experience? I had the watch on 2 hour bike rides and other workouts of similar duration without trouble - I can't see how 4 hours might a be a problem there.

but gps is a must if you want accuracy.

But why does it need a GPS when the watch still requires a bluetooth connection to a phone, which already has GPS? Unless it doesn't need a phone anymore?

It's my understanding that it doesn't need a phone anymore for workouts. It never did if you're ok without GPS, but now even GPS is built-in.

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