Apple Watch series 5 battery life

I had the same with a fairly new series 4 where I’d be lucky to get 10 hours. It was my first so I didn’t have any expectations. Friends were getting 24 - 30 out of theirs on occasion so I contacted customer support, and told them it did not meet the expected behavior. They ran a set of tests remotely, then I asked for it to be sent in for repair.

They have replaced the watch. I bought a 5 in the meantime, and I get easily 24 - 30 hours with always on switched on, raise to wake, all background apps refreshing.

i recommend you open a support ticket and ask for a repair. You’ll probably get a replacement.

or if it’s within 30 days take it back to the retailer that sold it to you for a refund/ exchange

My test today is going MUCH better. Took off charger at 6am. Did a 45 minute workout and after 90 mins, the watch was still at 100%. Now it is almost 9 hours later and watch still has 75%. I turned off Always On Screen and the Noise monitoring. Tomorrow I am going to enable Always On Screen, but leave Noise off and see if I get the same results.

If anyone else is having this battery drain, disable Noise and post your results. I am more confident that I will keep this, as I am sure Apple can fix the Noise app, or I can just leave it off.

Settings -> Noise -> Off

Feel the software is buggy on the series 5

hopefully they will get enough data to get it fixed

if you return your S5 you might opt for a series 4

Best Buy and others have great discount prices

other than increased memory, a new chip, and compass feature most reviews state the rest of the S5 is S4 guts

in my option The S5 should be called an S4s

After lots and lots of testing, I am sure the battery is good.

Today my wife ran a marathon. GPS on, Music on (cellular off)... finished with 28% remaining. AOD off just to make sure there was enough battery for music. Way better than her Series 3 ever did. S3 never made it through a marathon.

I did a 9 mile run earlier today. About 1:15. GPS on, Music on, recording with a Stryd foot pod, AOD off, only 15% battery used. Since then I recharged to 100%, tracked her during the marathon, GPS, maps (from phone but notifications on watch). Fully charged after my run and used 26% in 6 hours. AOD is still off on mine, but that was a lot of usage and screen time on during those 6 hours.

Not sure what changed but all is good now on my end.

So I tested out today. With always on display and doing nothing special I would lose between 7-10% per hour. With always on off. I would lose 2-3%. That’s over a 100% and in some cases 300% difference.

I've been playing with settings all weekend, rebooting the watch, turned off the always on display, went to the dimmest setting and I'm still losing 10% an hour which seems more than average. I am only using it laying around the house as I've had a cold all week! What gives! I am ready to return this and go back to the S3.

I have a series 4. I am certain I will never know precisely why my watch was draining so fast.., paired, unpaired 3 times. I almost suspect an unannounced software fix. Checked for an update, spinning dial commenced. The thought I had was many were attempting to download. Still have 6.0 but no more gross battery drain and I would say series 4 is back to baseline performance.

I had the same issue where the battery would drain so much and be dead after 5-6 hrs. I resolved it over the weekend. I suspected it was related to iCloud reminders as I had issues with it syncing on my iPhone and iPad. Once I turned off iCloud reminders on my iPhone and used reminders locally stored on the iPhone, it resolved my battery issues on my watch.

Of course turning off iCloud reminders would delete every reminder and you’ll need to recreate it locally. I am still waiting for Apple to fix my iCloud reminders syncing issues (didn’t resolve with iOS 13.1.2 installed)

Whatever the amount of time was that lapsed from the last full charge. If it was 8 hours since the last charge they would both show as 8 hours. Clearly buggy. As the watch is not used - it is on my arm showing time, not doing anything else.

Yeah, that I have never seen and it does sound wonky. That could be a glitch with the reporting or worse something is running in the background causing the Watch to always be active. Which would crush your battery.

Yeah as I noted in an earlier post, I personally turned of ALL background app refreshes, I turned off cellular, then I turned off ALL activity notifications and sound and AOD and anything else that makes this a smartwatch - in fact, I even turned on airplane mode to switch of the WiFi and Bluetooth radios. It drained slightly slower, at a rate of 8.5% per hour. That is still less than 12 hours with it being just a step above power reserve mode - so no, in my case, none of that helped. I did note a correlation in battery drain between my new iPhone 11 Pro and the watch. The 11 Pro got terrible battery life - worse than an SE. But that one day when I got the good battery life with the watch, my phone was at 82% at the end of the day.

Looking at the logs from the watch when instrumenting it, I saw hundreds of lines from various services per second - so this must be app chatter that is draining both in my case.

I'm sure, you'll nothing loose. It syncs with the health app. All my data were synced after installing the Apple Watch as a new one.

My understanding of the Usage data is “Usage” represents time the Watch is active, ie, screen on. “Standby” represents total time since taken off charger after reaching 100%.

Yep, thanks. I guess I need to keep my left hand in my pocket if I want the watch battery to last all day. :)