I waited a few weeks after the release of the Apple Watch until I pulled the wallet trigger and fired money Apple’s way. I figured the initial rush of inventory stock might have some manufacturing defects. Their attention to detail and polishing of their brand at every turn probably made that decision daft, but I held out a little while nonetheless.
Upon placing it on my wrist, setting a passcode, getting music on it, getting notifications, etc. I was in love. What a wonderful device that performs it’s tasks perfectly. Battery life was more than wonderful. Then after a few weeks, the battery started to drain quicker than normal. I would get about eight hours of life from it. I started to worry, played around by lowering the brightness, removing glance items, un-paring and re-pairing, resetting, etc. It didn’t seem to help very much.
Then I’d get five hours before it would die. I bought a second charging cable for work so that I could get some more battery charging complete to last me through the afternoon. Then I started to turn off Outlook notification and I said enough is enough. I booked an appointment at the Natick Collection genius bar.
They couldn’t connect to it to perform diagnostics, knew all the hoops I jumped through in order to fix the situation. They offered me a brand new watch which I gladly accepted. I took the second watch home and set it up as a brand new watch – no backup.
Ten hours battery life. That’s when I realized that something was amiss with my iPhone 6+. I checked my Bluetooth settings and saw a bunch of old device profiles stored on the phone. Pre-release stuff. I “forgot” those devices on the phone. Eighteen hours of battery life. A few days later and the watch is humming along at around twenty hours of battery life which is insanely awesome.
I imagine those BT profiles were constantly searching for their hardware (bugs) and somehow affected the watch so much that it was stuck in a terrible high-power loop. At least that’s my theory. The watch is awesome. Sometimes at night while the watch is charging I’ll feel a phantom tapping on my wrist. And I can’t wait until morning to put it on again.