Can my Apple Watch suffer water damage?

I purchased an Apple Watch (Series 6, Model M00H3LL, Serial Number SH8XFC22MQ1RP) from Best Buy in Fredericksburg, Virginia on 05/02/2021. I paid $379.00, plus tax.

I really love the watch and attribute it to assisting me in the loss of over 25 pounds. I work really hard at completing the fitness goals for the day (Move, Exercise, Stand).

A couple weeks ago I started incorporating swimming laps into my daily workout regimen. I swam probably four times and used the swimming feature to record my time, laps, and calories burned. Each time I swam I made sure to lock the watch before getting into the water and thoroughly drying it after the swim before unlocking it.

Early this week I finished my swim and unlocked my watch, as usual. I found the screen was unresponsive to the touch. I had to hard reset the watch by pressing both side buttons. I went to bed that night with my watch on and woke up with the watch completely drained of battery life. Normally I still have 50 to 60 percent battery remaining. After recharging it to 100% at 8am, I found the watch was down to 30% before noon. 

I checked on the Apple discussion page why the battery was draining so fast. It was recommended I unpair the watch from my phone and then re-pair it. After that the watch seemed to be working fine but the battery was still draining very fast. I recharged the battery again to 100%.

Not attributing the problem to swimming, I went back to the pool early that evening. After my swim I found the watch was unresponsive to touch again and battery life was down to 7%. I hard reset the watch again and placed the magnetic charger on it. An hour later I checked on the watch again and found it was powered off. It never came back on again.

It appears the cause of the problem was swimming with the watch. I don’t feel I negligently caused the damage. After all, there is a feature to “waterproof” the watch for swimming as exercise or being in wet conditions.

The watch is important to me so I had to go and purchase another watch the next day. I feel Apple should reimburse me for my water damaged watch. I would never get my iPhone wet, but since Apple promoted a swimming feature I figured it would be ok.

[Re-Titled by Moderator]