My Apple Watch SE 3 Experience
I’d been anticipating the Apple Watch SE 3 for a while because I wanted:
- A faster watch—I was happy with the original SE’s functionality, but it always felt slow.
- Longer battery life—I had started to need Low Power Mode to get through longer days.
- The ability to run newer software—the original SE was stuck at watchOS 10, a target that apps no longer seemed to be focusing on.
I was pleased to see that it delivered on all of these. Everything feels so much faster, even Siri. Battery life is no longer a concern at all, even when using the Always On display (though I prefer to turn that off). And complications for third-party apps seem to work better.
Some scattered early impressions:
The main downside is that using the new hardware required me to update my old iPhone to iOS 26.
The new wrist flick and double tap gestures seem like good ideas, but I haven’t found myself using them.
Find My, which had stopped working on my old watch—it would just never update anyone’s location—works again.
This is the first watch I’ve had that supports sleep tracking. I tried it out for several days, and it seemed to be accurate, but I don’t see that it’s actually helping me in any way.
It still often fails to unlock my iPhone when my face is covered.
Timers in watchOS 26 still seem worse than the old design.
Using a complication to invoke my dictation shortcut now takes about 2 seconds instead of 6–10. It still seems much slower than it should be, but this is a huge improvement.
The Weather app is still frustratingly limited, with no way to change the default metrics shown.
The OmniFocus complication still doesn’t update promptly. I can tell from other devices that the app itself has synced, but often the complication doesn’t update until I open the app on the watch, defeating the purpose of it.
I generally like the direction of watchOS. I haven’t really found any must-have changes since version 10, but there are a lot of little things that seem subtly better. This is sort of the opposite of macOS and iOS where each new version seems to make a bunch of little things worse. I’m not sure whether this is really what’s happening or whether it’s due to a difference in perspective, due to my not being a longstanding or power user of watchOS.
Liquid Glass is less annoying on watchOS.
There are two main problems I’ve encountered so far: charging and the setup/backup/restore process.
When I first got the watch, it worked great. But after several days (without any software update during that time) it would no longer charge using a third-party charger. (I tried four different chargers from multiple brands.) The watch would show that it was charging, and it would seem to for a while, but no matter how long I left it on the charger it would always plateau at somewhere between 41% and 69%. It’s as if it would reach a certain point and then stop charging. The watch would show its normal face instead of the green Nightstand Mode, and the iOS battery widget would show that it was no longer charging. Then it would occasionally charge a little bit to get back up to that point but never go beyond it. It continued to charge normally with multiple Apple charging cables.
At first, restarting the watch would help. It would then charge normally for a few days, at which point I’d have to restart it again. But then this workaround stopped working. Because restarting had helped, this seemed to me like a software issue. Around this time, Apple released a software update, but unfortunately it didn’t help. At this point I decided to contact AppleCare.
The Apple support person ran some diagnostics which showed no problems. But he said the diagnostics did not include the history shown in the battery settings, which clearly demonstrated the problem I was having. He wanted me to unpair and re-pair the watch to my phone, assuring me that everything would be backed up and restored. I was skeptical because updating to the SE 3 had lost my app icon arrangement in Springboard and required a long process to activate all my credit cards with Apple Pay. He assured me not to worry.
The first sign of trouble was that the auto-pairing banner didn’t pop up. It hadn’t done so when the watch was new, either. I had to go to the Watch app to initiate the process.
When I did so, sure enough, the promised settings were lost when restoring the watch. It didn’t even remember the watch’s name. He said there would be an option to choose to restore from backup and that I would be able to choose the backup for either my old watch (which was still paired with the phone) or my new one. It never gave me this choice and just restored something. It remembered the apps and complications and most settings but lost Apple Pay (which I think is as designed, despite what I was told) and my home screen. It also lost my shortcuts, which I restored by going to the iOS app and toggling (for each one) that it should be shown on the watch (even though that was already selected).
Another frustrating part of the restore process is that there’s no indication of progress. You see blank spaces where complications or apps should be, and they gradually fill in. At no point does it report that it’s done.
More talking with AppleCare. I explained the backup/restore situation and wondered if there was a way to preserve my old backup so that it wouldn’t get overwritten by a new backup of the restored watch (where the settings are wrong). He told me that the Apple Watch is backed up to iCloud (rather than to my phone) and that the backup should appear in my device list on the Apple Account Web site. I can have multiple backups per watch. These are also shown in Settings ‣ General on the watch and I can choose which to restore from after unpairing my watch. As far as I know, none of this is true.
Actually, it seems like we have virtually no control over watch backups. I don’t see any way of accessing an old watch backup other than by wiping my phone and restoring it from an old backup. With a Mac, if my Dock layout were messed up, perhaps I would have been able to find and restore an individual plist file, but there’s no such access on watchOS.
AppleCare continued to insist that my home screen would be restored but that there was no way to know how long this would take (there being no progress indicator). I should just wait several more hours. I did, but nothing happened. It was also clear by this point that the charging problem wasn’t fixed. They wanted to set up a call with a senior advisor who they assured me would be up to speed on my case and know how to fix all this. This seemed doubtful, but it was worth a try.
The senior advisor started out by asking what the problem with the watch was. She had not read any of the case history but—in possibly a first in my interactions with AppleCare—she did have access to it. After reading the notes, she had no idea what was going on with the icons or the charging. It must be a hardware problem, so I should send the watch in for service.
The first step, I was told, was to remove my iPhone from Find My. I confirmed that she didn’t mean the watch. That didn’t seem right, but it also seemed harmless, so I did it. Then it was time to erase the watch. This took a really long time—more than 5 minutes. I thought the watch was encrypted and so it only had to delete the encryption keys?
I mailed in the watch and soon received an e-mail saying that Apple had received it and found nothing wrong. I had doubted there was a hardware problem, anyway. Apple said that when I received my watch back there would be a letter explaining in detail what the repair depot had done. The actual letter was non-specific. It did not say whether Apple had actually tested the watch with third-party chargers. And it said that they might have updated the software. Judging from the the version number, they hadn’t.
I went through the pairing and restore process again, which again lost my home screen layout. By this time I had realized that you can also move the icons around using App View in the Watch app on the iPhone, which is much faster. But the big surprise was that, even though Apple seemingly hadn’t repaired anything, charging now worked. I still don’t know why it works. My only guess is that it was caused by a software problem and that fully erasing the watch was a deeper reset than just unpairing. I keep wondering whether the charging problem will come back, but so far it’s been working properly for almost two weeks, far longer than the honeymoon period when the watch was new. If it recurs, I guess I’ll try erasing it again.
Previously:
