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Comment by mulderc | Hacker News Reader

I wear my Apple Watch all the time, even when I'm sleeping. I pretty much just charge it when I'm in the shower or getting ready in the morning. It charges super fast, and I've found that having a regular charging routine is actually better for these gadgets.

Funny enough, watches with longer battery life can mess up your charging habits. I had this problem with my old Pebble watch. Yeah, the battery lasted longer, but I'd forget to charge it and end up with a dead watch more often than I do with my Apple Watch.

Now, I just pop it on the charger every morning, and I'm good to go. No more worrying about it dying on me out of nowhere.

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every single Apple feature or change creates this kind of weird negative-metric-reinforcement no matter the product whenever the number slides backwards or keeps parity

Battery doesn't last long? Well, let's forget that the entire market has trended towards catering to a customer desire for long-life batteries -- it's a feature to help coordinate 'charging habits'!... whatever that is.

Less keyboard space and battery life? No worries because that touch-bar is going to increase productivity so many more times than without it!

"No user replaceable battery? Of course not -- those are dangerous!"

which eventually devolves into :

"Well, my reception is terrible, but I was holding it wrong "

It's not really a grievance of mine, it's more like an utter amazement that somehow Apple and Tesla are the only companies that seem to be able to foster that kind of behavior in their fans.

The price points of both groups make me think it's sort of an advanced 'buyer's remorse' , but I don't know.

I largely agree with the parent comment. As of the series 7, charging became a non-issue since it’s so fast. It was painful before that.

And don’t _dare_ compare the charging situation to the touch bar. Let’s just all agree that was an abomination.

Worst / funniest case of this (if you have a grim sense of humor) is when early unibody macbook pros would get 70C or so to the touch and physically burn the users to the point of minor scarring. People who’d complain about this would be berated by apple defenders stating that “its not a laptop and apple never called it a laptop. yet at the time a simple search for “laptop site:apple.com” sure seemed to indicate that they are referred to as laptops by apple.

I save a lot of energy in the winter because I can turn down our home heater and the hot laptop keeps my fingers warmed up and typing fast!

The entire market has trended towards catering to a customer desire for lighter and thinner devices.

Exactly--GP's preference for a watch with a longer battery life and user-replaceable battery is at direct odds with the desire for a thinner watch. Presumably Apple has just done the math and decided the market is better for the latter? It's always been a bit chunky for a watch--maybe now it can finally approach "normal" watch size.

This is a bit hyperbolic. They take occasional risks like the touchbar and then they addressed it after bad feedback. I personally like their aggressive sense of design mission and not always playing it safe merely because it will cause flame wars on technology forums. Yet generally they keep the UX extremely clean and consistent through major versions.

Their mission with watch clearly isn't a multiday battery thing, it's a compromise for high quality displays and performance. The market exists for alternatives. The lack of good ones would be on them not just Apple.

In my decade plus experience those bad examples like touchbar are few and far in between.

Every tool has a correct way to be used. You can’t tell me I shouldn’t slide my electric toothbrush from side to side “because of market forces”.

Battery technology just isn’t there. Bigger battery means heavier device. Duracell made a smartphone with a huge-ass multiday battery… that the market did not ask for. It has to be a compromise unfortunately.

As for the Touch Bar I don’t really understand the hate for it. The execution was subpar but I miss its ability to autofill forms just like on the iPhone and generally using the autocomplete UI the same way. There’s no replacement now.

As for the batteries, I hope they’re eventually forced to fold on that issue, but it will come at the expense of design, size and weight. Again a compromise.

The reception one you’re right.

No I still don’t understand the Apple Watch battery issue.

I have a xaiomi mi band 9. The body to screen ratio is roughly the same as the Apple Watch. It does HR tracking, workouts, has excellent 1000 night brightness, weather, notifications etc. I get about 15 days from a charge. They say I can get 21. But either way. I understand the Apple Watch is running better hardware and more things in the background, but there’s also significantly more space in the watch for battery. It might be doing more but a factor of 15x is a crazy differential.

Comparing Apple Watch to Mi Band makes no sense. Apple Watch is more of a microcomputer than a cheap smart band. It would be better to compare it to something like Garmin Fenix 7X that lasts you almost 40 days with 120 hours in GPS mode and does much more than a Mi Band.

Calling it a "microcomputer" is meaningless.

What is it doing? Monitoring some sensors, communicating with a phone via bluetooth, running a screen.

It's miniaturized iPhone as it can be used without phone to make calls, receive messages, stream music etc. as it has e-SIM capabilities. It runs Game Boy Color games which is pretty cool even if not very useful.

Mi bands are low powered, low-feature and fairly miserable experiences if you interact much with the screen. They are great at no-effort tracking of fitness metrics and providing basic information.

Apple Watches are designed for much more interaction and variety of capability.

It can be hard to understand this if you haven’t used an Apple Watch.

You’re misinformed about the space for substantial additional battery. Look at any teardown to see the compact component fitting.

Your mi band is a great device; just be realistic about the tradeoffs. Other devices don’t have to suck for yours to be good.

(I’ve owned multiple Xiaomi and Apple devices.)

> As for the Touch Bar I don’t really understand the hate for it

You don't understand why people wouldn't like something that takes away what they used regularly (function keys) and gave them something that necessitated looking away from their screen in order to even use and provided extremely limited use cases?

Seems pretty easy to understand

throw in the mac magic keyboard (no backlight - not even on the 2021 revision) and the magic mouse 1.

> let's forget that the entire market has trended towards catering to a customer desire for long-life batteries

apple sells 34% of smartwatches: https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/02/22/apple-watch-domin...

and most of the rest are deeply crap Android things that don't have week-long battery life.

I think it's more interesting that Apple creates this reaction where people will endlessly harp on about things that happened over a decade ago under different leadership (holding it wrong) any time they update their products.

It’s even worse than that. Those words were never uttered. People have interpreted their own sentiment from what was actually said and now that phrase is repeated as it if it was.

When you notice your Garmin is under 10% it still means full day or enough battery to track 2-3h activity and still have some battery left. I'm surprised Apple watch battery is still - more or less the worst in the industry. Even if we forget about Garmin, comparable Samsung watches are multiday devices.

Garmin is great, but it is a fitness sports watch first and less of a smart watch. Once Garmin can have apps like overcast and omnifocus on them I will think of them as being in the some category as the apple watch.

Garmin has apps like Overcast. There are multiple music services built in like Spotify and YouTube that support podcasts. And there are additional third-party podcast apps on the Connect IQ store.

https://apps.garmin.com/search?keywords=Podcast

With my Garmin, I know 10% battery is probably almost enough battery for it to get a GPS lock.

Maybe. If I keep still for about 20mins and there aren't any buildings around.

And it's not a cloudy day.

A personal habit thing perhaps? My Pebble Time is still going strong but I religiously charge it every couple days (around 60%)... as you mentioned, while I showered. Before the most recent battery change I was down to about 48 hours on a charge. I do love taking weekend camping trips and not needing to take a charger.

I have tried a couple other smart watches but I keep going back to my Pebble as it does all I care about. Until they can get to a solid 4-5 days of life (or Rebble stops working) I don't know that I'll be too tempted to replace it permanently. The Garmin line is interesting though.

Time Steel here n exactly the same boat as you. How the world upgraded to a worse battery experience is beyond me. All I want is a watch that tells the time for days and it's nice to have smart features.

I used to use the Pebble, then the AmazFit Bip (with something like 40 days battery life) after that — finally only switching to an Apple Watch when Series 5 came with an always-on display.

Apart from telling time, I like how it tracks my steps and sleep, and can send music to my earphones so I don't have to bring my phone out for a run. I also like being able to use the watch as a camera viewfinder/remote.

One huge plus of the Apple ecosystem is the sheer number of watch straps I get to choose from, which lets me dress up the watch if I have to. And to top it all off, I get a nice screen.

I wouldn't have made the switch if the battery life was incompatible with my lifestyle, but so far, so good.

+1 to this. I charge whenever I'm in the shower as well, and this routine works for me.

To each their own, I wear my watch in the shower so I can change the song on my bluetooth speaker.

I feel like if you are making it through more than a couple songs, your shower is too long.

I do a lot of thinking in the shower. I’ve unblocked myself on many problems from shower thoughts.

Also, it’s just enjoyable.

I like that you like it, but as a minor PSA many people who care about the environment might not realise that a really long shower is probably one of the easiest wins in terms of carbon reduction they can make. I really enjoyed showing in my last place because we had solar hot water heating, but I’m always mindful of just how much energy it takes to heat water.

I know the Apple Watch is water resistant, but that doesn’t necessarily include the effect of soaps and detergents. Be careful with those, even if your gear is rated for the water itself.

That would be a very nice excuse to upgrade since I've been waiting for my S3 to kick the bucket for years. It's very scuffed, and have been wearing it to the shower since it was new, and even taken it river rafting.

Yet somehow it's reporting 90% battery capacity. I might finally upgrade anyway, since it's the only device holding me back from enabling advanced data protection on iCloud.

I used to do the same thing, but the UX was never great. I've now bought five of these cheap waterproof bluetooth speaker that has play/pause/skip controls on it, and it was a life changer. I keep one in my suitcase for travelling, one in each bathroom, and have a couple paired in stereo that I keep in my office. It sounds amazingly good for the size and price of the speaker. Some of the best $20 I've spent. Brand is "Notabrick": https://www.amazon.com/NOTABRICK-Bluetooth-Speakers-Portable...

I went the other way around haha. I used to have a cheap waterproof bluetooth speaker, but upgraded to a much better wall-powered speaker. Ikea sells white-labeled speakers made by Sonos, called ENEBY [1]. Their dual-woofer speaker was amazing for the price, on-par with something like a full size Homepod, for $90!

Unfortunately Ikea discontinued their larger version, and now sell Sonos/Ikea co-branded speakers instead with less drivers, and more money. They sound good, but not as good as their older, larger predecessors.

[1] https://www.siam2nite.com/en/magazine/lifestyle/item/834-mee...

Thank you! Did you bail from the small speaker because of sound quality?

Do you use your watch to control the Bluetooth playback? If so, When controlling it in the shower, do you find that the touch screen has a hard time sometimes registering your touch, or having it accurately sense?

We used to wind our watches in the morning. I think that could be Apple’s thinking. Your positive experience with a daily routine reenforces that idea to me.

Back in the day many of us switched to automatic mechanical watches that didn't require manually winding.

Yes, once it was technically possible. I think interesting idea is from a Human Factors perspective. I contend from human factors perspective using 24ish hours is good technical limit. Most humans operate on a 24 hour cycle so keeping devices on that cycle has a certain simplicity. It is easy to communicate and shares a historic limit with its mechanical ancestors.

This could also help in keeping the battery size in check. The engineering of all aspects should be balanced.

> Funny enough, watches with longer battery life can mess up your charging habits.

My experience with Kindles!

Yep! Funny how often I am traveling and get to the hotel and open up my kindle to find it needs a charge.

During the night, my wireless charger base on my nightstand charges my iPhone. When I get up in the morning I take my iPhone and put my Kindle on it during the day.

I use a Pixel Watch 2, not an Apple watch, but my charging behavior is pretty much as you describe. It goes on to charge during my morning loop, and is always full by the time I'm ready to head out the door. It's good enough that I don't have to think about the charge state at all through the day, it'll last regardless of usage, and that's all I need.

You are literally trying to show an enormous flaw of an otherwise amazing watch as a something positive which makes no sense to me. My Garmin also charges fast but lasts almost 3 weeks and I just plug it in when it tells me it needs to be plugged in and I don't need a "charging routine" for that.

I know what you are talking about with longer battery life :)

I have a "dumbphone" with a battery that lasts 1 to 2 weeks depending on use, it's such a surprise when the battery goes that I'm often stuck without it being charged.

Charging your wearable device shouldn't require "habits". If they do then the device is defective by design. Competing watches from Garmin don't seem to have this design flaw.

Not to mention the Chinese smart watches. I have an Amazfit Bip that will go 60+ days between charges, no problem.

https://i.imgur.com/4HT2Q6G.jpeg

How often do you track exercise with it? That watch looks like it doesn't actually run anything on it except a heart rate monitor and is just a passive bluetooth enabled notification display so that would definitely explain the difference in power usage.

Yes, for sure it does much less. It just has basic health monitoring, steps, heartbeat, sleep. I have the continuous heartbeat monitoring off, and turn it on for workouts 3-4 times a week. It will show messages, email, or other app notifications. For me that's most of what I want from a smartwatch, and I'm willing to trade the more advanced features for the battery life.

Ok but you can understand why comparing the battery life between these two makes no sense right?

> Amazfit Bip

I thought you had typoed but no, that's really what it's called.

Chinese naming can be pretty interesting. Probably would pay for itself to hire some native English speaking naming consultants. I've got my Bip on a Niziruoup rubber strap..

> Charging your wearable device shouldn't require "habits". If they do then the device is defective by design.

Why?

> Competing watches from Garmin don't seem to have this design flaw.

This oversimplifies the issue. The Apple Watch has a much broader range of functionality than Garmin's products, doesn't it?

Does it? Which specific functionality?

Late to the party, but the first thing that comes to my mind is an LTE radio. Yeah, there’s the Garmin 945LTE, but that is probably the worst Garmin purchase I’ve made ($12/month, can’t reply to texts, and it will burn through battery faster than an Apple Watch if it can’t find a cell tower).

I don't mind charging my watch daily when I go to my desk to do e-mail, I just want the watch to be handle skipping that for a few days due to travel or a weekend or whatever.

I mean it's literally a few minutes on a charger to go from 5% battery to 60%. Would it be more convenient if it went longer? Sure, but as it stands, if you carry a watch charger in your bag, like... even the most minuscule time on a USB port will have it ready to roll.

I've got an SE at current (had a 4 before it finally keeled over, and this one has essentially identical features and was readily available) and I just don't get the battery griping. Mine only uses a scant 70% ish of it's available capacity. I wear it every day while sleeping and to/from work, then come home and toss it on the charger till bed time.

I have a handful of watch chargers including one at my desk and one in my laptop bag. A full day of kid activities and work around the house doesn't really see either of those though. Do I detour to top up the watch a couple times a day? Yes. Does my watch run out of juice some days? Also yes. Would a Fitbit or Garmin have this problem? No. It's a bit of a slog moving my health data out of Apple's ecosystem which is why I haven't done it yet.

The other good charging time/place is your car/bike when commuting.

If you have a 20min commute each direction you can get most of the way charged and make it through the night!

Yep, just work in short frequent charges during downtime like that. I was worried about being annoyed by the charging too but in reality it’s not been a problem at all

I still wear my series 6 that I bought in 2020. It usually tops off within 15 minutes of charging, And then it's good for the day.

I have a garmin watch. Charge it every day while I'm taking a shower and it's always ready.

...but I can miss a day... or 12 days. 13d = full charge

I don't think a Garmin watch and an Apple Watch are truly comparable. The Garmin is primarily a fitness watch, while the Apple Watch is a smartwatch. When a Garmin can run apps like OmniFocus, Overcast, a Mastodon client, an Instagram client, and even join a Zoom call, then I'll consider it a smartwatch.

Everyone has their own list of needs for a smartwatch though. Mine are always on display, steps and heartrate tracking, and notifications. I can't imagine ever caring about running any of the apps you listed on a watch, and I don't think I'm in the minority.

What do you use to charge it? I haven't found a good base station for it

I just put mine on the Apple Watch charging cable.

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