Why is my Apple Watch Series 11's battery life drastically reduced after updating to the latest OS?

I upgraded to a series 11 watch at the end of October before *OS 26.x was released and was enjoying excellent battery life. I would end the day (10pm to 8pm) with a more than 60% remaining. Now that I have everything at the latest OS release, I am seeing battery life drop. At 7am I am seeing the same amount of battery remaining as I used to at 7 or 8PM. One day this week is dropped to 21% by 6PM. I restarted after that, to make sure any runaway processes were cleaned up. But this is still much worse than the series 7 this was meant to replace, after 4 years of service.


Any ideas? This is clearly a misfeature of some kind but is it in macOS or iOS, since they are so closely connected?


[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: Series 11 watch battery life draining with all up to date software, much worse than series 7 watch. I upgraded for battery life improvements as well as features. Not seeing the win yet.


Apple Watch Series 11, watchOS 26

Posted on Dec 19, 2025 7:40 AM

Reply
4 replies

Dec 19, 2025 6:46 PM in response to Rudegar

It's two months old. I don't expect to see any health issues yet. I have looked, nothing to report. I think something may be running (as when it went down to 21% a day or so back) or there is some excessive network traffic between it and the phone or some other service. Not like I can ssh into the watch or look at a process table and see.

Dec 20, 2025 2:50 AM in response to pdb206

pdb206 wrote:

It's two months old. I don't expect to see any health issues yet. I have looked, nothing to report. I think something may be running (as when it went down to 21% a day or so back) or there is some excessive network traffic between it and the phone or some other service. Not like I can ssh into the watch or look at a process table and see.

How much did the battery drop in the overnight powerdown test? Or did you ignore everything in my link?

Why is my Apple Watch Series 11's battery life drastically reduced after updating to the latest OS?

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