Q: Apple Watch eats iPhone 6's battery
hi,
after pairing my Apple Watch with my iPhone 6, I've noticed dramatic reduction in battery life. The iPhone only lasts ca 3 hours(!) from full charge and the watch only a little longer.
The iPhone would get uncomfortably warm in the process and the battery drain is so bad it even drains faster than a 2.1A external battery pack can re-charge (meaning the iPhone's battery would still go down while being plugged into the battery pack). All this happens while hardly using the watch at all.
I've suspected a rogue 3rd party app using lots of Bluetooth and CPU time, so I un-paired and re-paired the watch and this time only installed the native apps, not a single 3rd party app.
The result is only marginally better.
The only way of stopping the battery drain is to put both devices into airplane mode, which obviously defies the object of a smart watch.
Furthermore apps on the watch (calendar for example) take very long to load and sometimes don't show a result at all before crashing.
I can only assume that my experience is a freakish edge case, otherwise the internet would be ablaze with comments. Nevertheless, has anybody got an idea why this might be happening and what I could do next? (I'll probably factory reset my iPhone tonight and see what happens then)
Posted on Apr 27, 2015 7:03 AM
Update:
After a long but unsuccessful visit to the Apple Store (the Genius agreed with me that something was fundamentally wrong with my Watch, but they don't have any replacement stock, so the Watch would have to be returned via the online store - something I could have initiated from the comfort of my home, sparing me the 1.5hrs drive to the store...), I decided to look into some of the other odd bahaviours my Watch had shown, which I had so far put down to being side effects of the main problem which I suspected to be a defect on the Bluetooth Side.
I've consistently had issues getting the watch unlocked. Sometimes it would take me an hour of restarting either device until finally the blue padlock symbol would disappear.
So when I found this thread Problem Setting Passcode on Apple Watch, I thought why not give it a try with a factory reset iPhone without the profiles for my corporate exchange server and security policy installed and hey presto - that solved it!
I've been using the watch all day and it behaves perfectly normal. It's responsive and most of all the battery is still at 78% after almost 6 hours of use! Yay!
So I'll be very brave now and install the corporate profiles, as one of the other threads seemed to imply that the passcode would work as long as it is set up before the profiles are installed. Let's see...
Posted on May 2, 2015 7:01 AM