Apple Watch Ultra’s Best Feature: Battery Life

Jason Aten, writing for Inc.:

I don’t run marathons or climb mountains or dive. I don’t often find myself in remote locations in precarious situations. I joked that, for me, the Apple Watch Ultra will be the perfect thing to wear while other people are working out. Like, for example, when I’m keeping track of my daughter’s cross-country race splits.

When I first started wearing the Ultra, I was sure the most useful feature was what Apple calls the Action Button. I still think the ability to assign a dedicated button to things like starting a workout or a stopwatch is great, but there’s a far better feature, and the most surprising thing is that Apple isn’t making a big deal of it at all.

That’s the fact that the Apple Watch Ultra has ridiculous battery life, at least by Apple Watch standards. Yes, Apple has said that the Ultra has the best battery life of any Apple Watch. But Apple is dramatically underselling the battery life on its new flagship wearable, claiming it gets 36 hours. In my experience, it got more than 60 hours.

Two thoughts about this:

  • Perhaps Apple underplays the Ultra’s battery life so as not to make the battery life on the regular Series 9 models look bad? From my experience while reviewing the original Ultra, I could get two days of battery life on a single charge even while wearing it to sleep.

  • The battery life on all Apple Watch models from the last few years offers a stark contrast to the dedicated AI gadgets we’re starting to see, like Humane’s AI Pin and Rabbit’s R1 handheld dingus. It goes under-remarked-upon that Apple is really really good at making computer hardware, and particularly at making small computer hardware.

★ Monday, 6 May 2024