The Apple Watch may be pretty... but you are going to need up to 8 of them to make it through a full day. While Tim Cook proclaimed 18 hours of "all-day battery-life" - itself not particularly impressive compared to competing products, hidden deep in Apple Watch's product page [4] is a little admission that battery life (in use) could be as low as 3 hours...
The admissions are significantly less than the 18 hours that Apple chief executive Tim Cook announced in the glitzy launch on Monday.
They could prove a major problem for users who will have to charge up multiple times in a day using the magnetic clip-on charger.
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He claimed it would be "revolutionary", but now it seems that the battery might be what one tech website described as its "Achilles Heel".
On its website, Apple gave figures for battery life based on the smaller 38mm (1.4 inch) version. The 42mm (1.7 inch) version will last longer, though no figures were given.
Leaving it in reserve mode will last up to 72 hours, and leaving it in "Watch Test" mode will last up to 48 hours.
But should you use any of the features Mr Cook talked about in his press conference, it will last significantly less.
Apple tried to make the figures more impressive by giving an example of a typical user chewing up their 18 hours of battery life as follows: 90 time checks (five per hour), 90 notifications, 45 minutes of app use, and a 30-minute workout with music playback via Bluetooth.
But on the product page of the watch website, it also gave the lower figures for talking or using it to workout.
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[6]
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Remember Google Glass?
Battery life had been an issue with Google’s Glass eyewear - now discontinued - and when connected to the Internet it lasted just 30 minutes.
And here's Bloomberg to explain the problems with the $10,000 edition...
There has been no mention yet at all of the biggest elephant in the room: what do you do with a solid gold watch when it becomes obsolete? One would hope for some kind of trade-in or recycling program that prevents all that gold from sitting unused in a drawer, but it will likely be a while before we know of anything real. (Many $10,000 mechanical watches actually rise in value after you purchase as the years go by.)
