Photo: Studio Monkey (Shutterstock)
When it comes to the Apple Watch, “all-day battery life” is Apple’s party line—but what that really means is an 18-hour battery cycle. If you want to push it over a day, you need to stick to light use (and not wear it to bed). But now, with watchOS 9, Apple is introducing a new “Low Power Mode” to the watch for the first time.
Every Apple Watch from Series 4 and up will be able to access this feature. Apple says in this mode, you can expect 36 hours of battery life, essentially doubling the typical Apple Watch usage time. If you have an Apple Watch Ultra, that number jumps to 60 hours. Practically speaking, if you don’t wear the Apple Watch at night, you can easily stretch the battery life by a couple of days.
Low Power Mode works by turning off battery-draining features like the Always-On display, heart-rate notifications, background heart-rate monitoring, background oxygen-level monitoring, and start-workout reminders. When your iPhone isn’t nearby, it will also turn off wifi and cellular connections, as well as the ability to accept iPhone calls on your Apple Watch. In general, calls and notifications might take longer to arrive.
Image: Apple
If you think these are worthy sacrifices to make for extended battery life, you can enable it by swiping up on the watch face to access Control Center. Tap the Battery icon, and then tap the toggle next to the “Low Power Mode” option.
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You’ll see a new screen that will explain all the things thae watch will turn off, as well as two options: Simply tap the “Turn On” button to enable Low Power Mode, or you can use the “Turn On For” option to enable it for one, two, or three days. Once it’s enabled, you’ll see a yellow circle in the top status bar.
If you feel like it’s the workouts that drain your Apple Watch battery, there’s a separate feature that automatically turns on Low Power Mode when you start a workout. Go to Settings > Workout > Low Power Mode to enable that feature.
If you don’t enable Low Power Mode and your watch’s battery drops to 10%, you’ll get a popup asking if you’d like to enable it; once it’s charged up to 80%, Low Power Mode will be automatically disabled.
