My Apple Watch SE 3 Experience

Thank you for writing this. I experienced an almost-identical charging issue with a Series 7 watch starting on watchOS 11.

Just as you experienced, the watch would refuse to charge past a certain point until restarted - at which point perform perfectly for a couple of days before failing to charge again. However this was using Apple original chargers and cables rather than third-party. It even refused to charge at the Genius Bar using their charger - until restarted.

Thankfully my Genius-advised wipe/restore dance worked without issue, except that it did not fix the charging problem - neither did setting up the watch as new (a.k.a. full reset). A "battery replacement" (a.k.a. replacement watch) also did not fix the charging issue even when set up as new.

Eventually I switched to a new Series 10 watch (now on WatchOS 26) and the issue has only rarely recurred (~6 times in one year).

I also concluded that it must be some kind of software issue, and suspected it might be something in my iCloud account which was transferred to the reset/new watches despite not restoring from backup.

“Longer days”

What is a longer day? A day with more than 24 hours? If it’s a day where you are more actively using the watch, it’s still does not make sense that a watch has such a poor battery life.

AppleCare support sounds a *lot* like a typical experience with our beloved and maligned National Health Service:

Yeah, we're out of options here. Would you like to persist with a specialist? I can refer you. Oh, of course, don't worry, they'll be fully up to speed on your case and the ins and outs of our experience. I'll write it up.

[a waiting list passes]

So who are you and why are you here?

@someone Yes, a day where I’m more actively using the watch and/or where I’m awake for more than the typical number of consecutive hours. These weren’t issues when the watch was new, but after 3+ years it’s down to 72% of its original capacity.

@John What gets me is that they talk as if they’ve never even used the product. The senior advisor did a search and discovered there was a “new” optimized charging feature and tried to suggest that maybe the halted charging was by design. (The first thing I did when encountering this problem was to turn off optimized charging just to make sure that a bug with it wasn’t causing this behavior.)

Wish I saw your Apple Watch Early Adopter post before. I ended up getting a Series 10 over the holidays when it dropped in price. First Apple Watch for me. I gotta say, it feels sort of buggy and half-baked in spots, while great in others. I feel mixed about my Watch even now. I think your Early Adopter post covered a lot of the good, and it just feels like Apple hasn't full thought out the Watch experience in some ways. Very unfortunate that seems to apply to how they handle support for it too.

Sort of surprised Apple still hasn't figured out how to improve battery life over these 11 generations of watches though. The iPhone integration can't be beat obviously and makes the Apple Watch more functional in some ways compared to the competition, but I was looking at this comparison to Huawei on Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/AppleWatch/comments/1pslxi2/why_are_the_battery_lives_so_bad/. Makes me wonder what Apple is doing or not doing to still only be at "all day" battery life all these years later.

If they break the find my feature my wife will have to get a new watch.

It's the one feature she's using, but she uses it a lot.

Having been on both sides of support like this, it’s a crapshoot at best. I never understood why no one ever seems to read notes. I suppose they are all overworked and undertrained, which is sadly extremely common. No one appreciates the support department, it’s seen as an irritating cost center.

Also the watch is severely neglected as a standalone device because it’s essentially not one. It’s stuck where the iPhone was around the iPhone 4 or so by memory. Where it required a computer to do anything. Even then backups weren’t as dicey.

When I got this iPhone 17 Pro Max was the first and only time the transfer process actually worked. My series 10 transferred so seamlessly I never even took it off and had to check to be sure but yep it transferred.

But upgrading the watch itself, I’ve never ever had a backup and restore work. Fortunately there’s no actual data on it and it’s all settings. Which is probably why they don’t care, Apple hates settings.

The other issue with support is it’s a great example of the Peter Principle. People who know tech and are good at it do not stay on the phones. They move on and up. Very rarely do you get someone good and experienced on phone support because absolutely no one wants to do it. For every Michael Tsai that calls and knows what they’re doing and makes it easy, there are ten thousand difficult people who don’t know what they’re doing.

@Bart It seems like reading the notes would make things easier for them, too, or maybe increase their throughput metric. But there must be some reason they never do it. (Usually they tell me they don’t have access to the notes, which I’m not sure I believe.)

Having just restored my Ultra 2 from backup, I can confirm that it's basically useless and doesn't really "restore" much more than a few layout settings. Worse than that, though, it screws up iPhone settings, such as notifications for iPhone apps for which there are companion watch apps, and even Siri's voice. So before I can even get my watch going again, I have to undo all the changes that were (un)made by the restoration process. Very, very irritating. Apple should really make it very clear when settings are shared like that so they can be corrected in the course of configuring the watch, but they don't and so you must basically stab in the dark to find them.

My observation is that Apple seems to ship firmware updates that either

- disable some of the non-MFI third party accessories
- or enforce stricter checks for MFI compatibility (which effectively disables some of the non-MFI accessories)

Hard to tell what is the original intent for this (my bet is Apple likes both, just like always shipping “one last iOS version” that finally makes oldest devices unbearably slow and forces people to upgrade - I’ll never “upgrade” my kids’ SE2’s to iOS 26).

The effect is that when I bought cheap lighting SD card reader for iOS 15, it worked, but after iOS 16 update, I plugged it in, it worked for the first time, until the iPhone silently downloaded the updated drivers, and on next plugging in, it told me that it is an unsupported accessory.

I would guess the story with the watch charger works similarly.

@Michael

I bought an Apple Watch Ultra when it came out. I’m an avid hiker, and my Series 5 was struggling badly on the battery front, quite scratched up and yet still accepted as a full-value trade-in. I still have that Ultra now, scratch-free and still high endurance.

That's the hardware, though. The software is a whole other story. Surprising absolutely no one…

I have toggled that optimised charging feature countless times, too. My first gen Ultra absolutely supports it—I swear I've seen it work a few times!—but it's a rare sight indeed to ever find it under 100% on the charger. What the? I've long since given up on restoring it, filing the bug yet again or blindly hoping for re-emergence in an update. That feature's clearly just dropped dead for me somewhere along the way. Nice testing, guys.

Watch OS 29 introduced a new bug that's had me cursing my Ultra while listening to podcasts playing on the watch, which I prefer over my phone for physical convenience. At first I thought it was Overcast specific, but it affects Apple's own Podcasts app on the Watch just as badly. Simply: skip back or forwards in any audio, and the watch will often completely forget its playback position and skip back to the very start. For hour-long audio like podcasts this is simply MADDENING! What a basic and showstopper of a bug! What are they doing? No amount of deleting apps or restoring the Watch has done a damn thing for this.

When Cook retires, I really hope the shakeup results in better QA generally and bug tracking in particular. Apple's built up a lot of debt in recent years with users and developers alike. The deterioration is real, and Apple's complete obliviousness to this is storing up a world of hurt.

Watch OS 26 rather! Though if 29 works on this Ultra I'll keep an eye out for the optimised charging phantom.

Even without that feature, my battery health is still at 99%, despite working out every day and using the Ultra quite heavily throughout. I like to think this is because I kept my 5's charging cable—the old white USB "A" version—which lets my Ultra charge up nice and slowly, keeping it notably cooler as it does so. I’m happy to give it a couple of hours on the charger a day and spare the strain. Who knows, maybe it helps. At least I can rely on 5 Watts slowing things down if the software adamantly won't.

@Tomáš It’s probably something like that, but the weird thing is that the third-party chargers do work, just not to charge all the way. It’s disappointing how few MFI watch chargers there are, how expensive they are, and how their designs are so much worse than the non-certified ones.

I have lot's of devices, my own, as I keep at least two sets of everything, then kids ones, so after all I completely abandoned restoring backups. I always do clean installs and focus on making that efficient. I have my properly curated task list on what to do, in what order, and if any of that can be automated or semi-automated I use my custom scripts. And it applies for all kind of devices. It's still faster and better this way.

@Michael I think they don't think they have access to the notes because they never tried to scroll down, open the notes tab, etc. I wonder if a lot of it is just poor training. I've worked with people who refuse to even see any part of the ticketing system they don't directly have to type something into.