Could Apple Watch 'excitement ' bring its battery life down to 12 hours?
Amid the flood of adulation over the Apple Watch, questions continue over battery life, first flagged up on Twitter. Chief Executive Tim Cook has said the watch will run for about 18 hours on a battery charge.
The Apple Watch: 18 hours of battery life enough?
But some analysts told the Wall Street Journal that when the watch is used more extensively, to send and receive messages or phone calls, for example, the battery might not last 18 hours.
“We think that Apple Watch is quickly going to become integral to your day, and so we’ve designed it with all-day battery life across a range of activities,” Cook said on Monday at the big media event in San Francisco. “During a typical day you can expect 18 hours—so that works for most people, I think.”
Apple’s 18-hour estimate is based on testing done this month, in which a user looked at the screen five times each hour. On its website, the company said that “battery life varies by use, configuration and many other factors; actual results will vary.”
This performance is about equal to competing smartwatches powered by Google ’s Android Wear operating system.
James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, told the WSJ that based on the performance of rival watches, he expects that the Apple Watch will likely get closer to 10 to 12 hours of battery life for many early buyers.
“The problem is that the people who are excited to buy these things are going to want to use it every chance they get and do as much with it as possible,” he said.
Other analysts had hoped the battery would last even longer than 18 hours. “It’s a little disappointing,” said Bradley Gastwirth, head of the ABR Investment Strategy research firm. “Most investors wanted to see at least a full day—24 hours—something you could wear overnight.”
The WSJ pointed out that during the Apple Watch presentation, the Apple executive team didn’t mention several activities that would require longer battery life, such as sleep tracking or even using it as a gently vibrating morning alarm.
Despite battery worries, analysts expect the Apple Watch to far outsell rivals. Only 720,000 smartwatches running Android Wear were shipped globally in 2014. Analyst estimates for Apple Watch shipments this year range from 10 million to 40 million.
The most important aspect of the Apple Watch’s first run isn’t how long it’ll stay on, but rather what it does when it is on, says M.S. Krishnan, a University of Michigan professor of computer and information systems.
“The make-or-break part here comes in how contextual the experience will be, how personal the information that is being sent to you is, how compelling it is,” Krishnan told the Journal.
“Battery life will have to improve over time if the Apple Watch is to have any staying power. But the people who’ll buy this are already used to charging their phone every night.”
Apple and other companies should be aiming for a week’s worth of battery life within the next few years, said Daniel Matte, a Canalys analyst quoted by the WSJ.
“Every time someone takes off a smartwatch, you’re potentially losing that user,” he said.
“Nobody making a smartwatch wants that to happen, so this is a problem that will get solved. It’ll just take some time," he added.
Even for users who would find 18 hours sufficient, another concern is how the battery capacity erodes over time.
Apple will offer to replace old batteries in its watches, just like it does in aging iPads and iPhones.