So if a £16 generic competitor can last 4 days, what's Apple doing wrong? Why can't a £450 Apple Watch (non-Ultra) last a full 24 hours on a charge?
If Apple had two lines of smartwatches, one for city/work crowd with the WiFi, Bright screen, NFC, powerful processor etc. but with tiny battery life. And another for hike/off-grid/travel/festival crowd without wifi, a slower, blander screen, slower hardware, less features but over a week)weeks on one charge.
Would people not buy the second option?
They've seriously stuck themselves in a pickle with their WatchOS offering. They can't move away from touch-screen b/c they've committed to "being able to enter a PIN" from the device (so they can offer AND PROTECT on-watch payment capabilities).
They can't move away from touch-screen b/c they've duped all the uber's and door-dash's, and big-bank.com into writing "watch apps" that assume a touch screen.
The Garmin Fenix has the best response to this that I've seen so far, a "pinch-to-activate" touch screen on some of their watches with "enough" buttons (Up, Down, OK, Back, "light"). You can use the watch normally without fear of accidental activations and when you start up the map-type-stuff, it'll either auto-activate a twiddly touchscreen or you can "pinch to activate" (hold two diagonal buttons for 2-3 seconds) and then start messing with it (or are able to turn it off w/o issue).
They can't move away from bright color screens because then people can't have pictures of their kids on their watch, and at that point it's no longer an "Apple" product.
Which relates to the cost and battery life of the Apple Watch, it's a mainstream device that many people with varying disabilities can use. It has a full-fledged screen reader in its operating system, in addition to the development costs to support multiple interaction modalities, some will not be achievable with lower-powered, less specialized processors.
Of course if they want to use it with an Apple phone, it will have artificial limitations[0]. That, rather than adding a product line that doesn't align with most of their market is what Apple should fix.
[0] https://ericmigi.com/blog/apple-restricts-pebble-from-being-...
Comparing the flagship model to the much cheaper SE, what they're buying is:
* a larger, brighter, always-on display * additional health sensors, monitoring * can go deeper underwater * longer battery life (if you choose low power mode) * faster battery charging * more powerful processor * twice the local storage * Ultra wideband radio (enables directional device finding) * microphone with voice isolation (better sounding calls, voice recordings) * made from more recycled materials (which may make it more expensive)
I'm happy with my non-cellular SE, I do which charging was faster but I don't know the Series 10 charges that much faster and I wouldn't pay an extra ~$150 for that anyway.
For example: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tot-mini/id1644609331
Whether it's a good idea to use a tiny watch screen as your text editor, on the other hand...
I don't think there's an app that lets you just edit arbitrary files which can be read by other apps or transferred to/from the watch with something like ssh, just these weird canned things that depend on network services run by Apple and/or the particular developer.