I spent the day yesterday running the latest betas of El Capitan, iOS 9, and watchOS 2.0. One of the comments I’ve heard from previous betas is a complaint about poor battery life on both iOS 9 and Apple Watch. I thought I’d track my battery life, share those numbers here.
My iPhone 6 has auto-brightness and Bluetooth enabled, as well as all the goodies that are turned on by default (parallax is on, to name one power-affecting example). I spent the day listening to Apple Music periodically, sometimes through the iPhone speaker, sometimes via headphones, and sometimes via Bluetooth. I’d estimate that I spent more time on my iPhone than I typically do in a day. I hardly used my computer at all yesterday.
That said, here are the iOS 9 Beta 3 numbers:
– After 5 hours, my phone was at 71%. That’s a consumption rate of 5.8% an hour.
– After 8 hours, my phone was at 47%. That’s a rate of 6.6% an hour.
– And after 16 hours, my phone was at 8%. That’s a rate of 5.75% an hour.
As to Apple Watch, the numbers were remarkable. I should note that my Apple Watch usage is relatively light. Yesterday, I used it mostly to receive notifications and check the time. For me, that’s typical usage. My past experience (with watchOS 1.x) was a battery at about 50% by the end of a 16-hour day. My model is the 42mm Apple Watch Sport.
Here are yesterday’s numbers:
– After 5 hours, my Apple Watch was at 92%
– After 8 hours, my Apple Watch was at 85%
– And after 16 hours, my Apple Watch was at 72%
That is terrific battery life. Clearly, this battery life may change as I start running apps that run on the watch instead of simply communicating with apps on my iPhone. But any negative battery impact from onboard running will be balanced by, presumably, less requirement for communicating with the iPhone.
Draw your own conclusions here. Your mileage may vary.
I assume that’s the 42mm watch you have?
the current beta (and beta 2) whacked the wifi on my iPhone 6+ to where it will try to join a network, fail 99% of the time, then try again a few minutes later. Sometimes it prompts for password (even though it’s a network it already knows the password to, it assumes it’s changed.)
That absolutely killed my battery. Turning off wifi got my battery back around the level of 8.4. maybe off a few percent but not noticeably.
Also pairing a brand new (with shipped watchOS) Apple watch with Beta 2 (scared to try under Beta 3) was a nightmare. I ended up having to completely wipe the phone to fix it. Supposedly a reset without wiping the phone will fix for some, but 5 resets didn’t fix it for me, just the wipe. Watch battery is excellent but i’ve only had it a week.
My watch battery drained yesterday by 6 pm and went into power save mode. First time it’s ever been lower than 20% (for a full day). I didn’t seem to do anything different. Today (12:40 pm) it’s at 91%. Any increase in battery life would be great.
I’ve found that separating my watch from my iPhone has a big hit on battery life so I try to avoid the little red not connected icon.
Not experiencing the Wi-Fi issues you report on my iPad Air 2 with beta 3.
Hmm…. I have them together nearly all the time but get the red dot a lot.
How is the performance compared to iOS 8 on your iPad 2?
the red dot is notification received. If you drag down and press on the notification for a bit – a second or two you can clear all the notifications.
The red oblong with a line through it is the issue – that’s what happens when the watch can’t find the iPhone it’s paired with.
Thx Ratty. BTW, having trouble updating Watch to 2.0beta. Running iOS9beta1 on iPhone and downloaded the profile to the Watch but get “your are running latest software 1.01”. Is Watch 2.0 part of public beta?
Check what apps you have in settings_general_background refresh. Huge battery sink especially if your 3rd party apps aremt optimized for ios 9. Most people don’t need any of these unless you need something like real time stock updated. 🙂
My experience with the iOS 9 public beta so far has been very positive. I’ve had very few issues, and they have been minor, brief, and isolated. Honestly, most of the time I don’t even feel like it’s beta software – it feels like iOS 8 with a new font and some cool new features.
My mileage is severely limited by the building that I work in. Its ironic: my employer is AT&T based for cell-ephony and I live in Dallas, which is also heavily AT&T based. But my work building has weird EM-shielding in it, so I totally lose signal in areas of the building where I spend a lot of time. And when I’m not in those areas, I still see spinning signal bars a lot of the time. I am sure that those are sucking battery, and I suspect that that are also using mobile data, even though I am not actually receiving data as those processes roll.