My wife has a Series 8 Apple Watch that I purchased in October 2024. Been working great until end of January. The battery would only hold a charge for about 7-8 hours tops. Fully charged overnight, taken off charger at 8am and worn until she got low battery alert anywhere from 2:30-4:00pm. Watch shows battery at 100% health.
My wife uses this mostly as a watch or checking text messages. It is a Cellular model but is not active.
Restarted watch, reset watch, unpaired and repaired, set up as new but still the same issue. Took it into the Apple store and their Diagnostics show the watch is not showing any issues. They sent it in to the Watch Service center and they restored the software fresh. Set up as new to prevent bringing anything odd back. Watch now ran for around 10 hours before low battery warning. Week later we are back to less than 8 hours of run time. Unpaired it and set it up with my iPhone… same results. AppleCare chat suggesting taking it back to store. Did that and they cannot find any issue but offered to send it to Service Center again or replace it Out of Warranty for a cost. Declined OOW replacement since this is still less than a year old.
What am I missing???
The battery shows it is at 100% but the graph shows it steadily dropping throughout the day. No rapid drops or heavy usage.
Does it matter where your wife is e.g. is there some form of interference at home which specifically affects that model and it’s connection to the iphone?
I do not believe there is an interference issue at home. She has an iPhone 16 that is up to date. Her iPhone is always in range most of the day. Restarting her iPhone made no difference.
I had the same result with her watch when pairing to my iPhone 16 Pro Max.
Perhaps there is a Parasitic draw on the battery that doesn’t show in testing?
Apple has factory restored the watch twice now. It was returned to us today and I’m about to pair it up as new. Wish us luck!
Recently, @ismh86 mentioned bad battery life after he changed his networking gear to Ubiquiti Wifi 7 gear. I believe he said on a show that he replaced the Wifi 7 APs with Wifi 6(e?) APs and that effectively resolved the battery life problems. I realize this is a long shot, but thought I would share that in the event you might be in the same boat.
I remember @ismh86 bringing that up, but I’m “not rolling in that podcast money” to be able to afford Ubiquiti just yet, and I’m still on Wifi 6.
I did set up her watch as NEW last night and turned off everything possible. Did not restore from any previous backup. Took it off the charger and placed it on her desk at 9:00pm and at 8:00am this morning it was at 5%. Better but still not the 18 hours we expect. Will report back tomorrow.
Something is seriously wrong with that. I can wear my Apple Watch 6 (which I wore every day until I bought my Apple Watch 9) at night between 11pm(ish) and 7am and it loses less than 20% battery life.
I assume when you say set as new, you didn’t install any 3rd party apps?
What happens if you do the same tonight, and turn off the Wifi and Cellular (I know you’ve no plan)?
My Series 7 shows 79% battery health and it has 51% charge after wearing it for 11 hours. Non-cellular. Only thing I did today was get a bunch of text messages, turn notifications while driving, and checking a couple of apps.
The battery on my series 6 is failing now, but how long it lasts is directly related to what is running in the foreground or background on the watch. I have days when I can have 30% left at bedtime from an overnight charge and others where I am down to 20% by late morning. Sometimes I have an idea what has caused that (e.g. pedometer++ on a long walk) and sometimes I have no idea (but suspect something has been busily syncing)
I had a somewhat similar experience with my barely over-a-year-old Series 8 last year, but battery health was down to an abysmal 82% at the time (the worst for any Apple product I’ve ever owned). It had a period of about a week where it would drain down the battery before noon (with no activity tracking or anything) before it went back to sort of normal, but it still never lasted past early afternoon. No reset, uninstall of any apps, or anything helped at all. Frustrated, I gave in and bought a Series 10, which I had not planned on doing at all.
Contacted AppleCare tonight via chat and was transferred to a Senior Advisor right away. She saw that the watch had been sent in twice and let me explain all the steps I have tried so far. After I finished and asked “what could we do next?” she stated that Apple wanted to swap the watch under warranty. We can stop in any Apple Store within the next 30 days to replace it. She sent me an email confirming this and apologized for the inconvenience. My wife is happy that this is almost over and part of me would REALLLLLY like to know what caused this issue.
Please keep fingers crossed that my wife has her replacement watch on her wrist by Monday.
At this point I think that is the best solution. Fingers crossed that the battery in the next watch is up to par. I feel like you just got a lemon the first time. I suppose it happens on occasion.