Five years ago – on April 24, 2015 – Apple released its first smartwatch: Apple Watch. After presenting it in September 2014, during the reveal of iPhone 6, Apple started taking pre-orders on April 10, 2015; two weeks ahead of shipping them. Due to international travel, jetlag and, well, sleep on that very day I wasn’t able to get an early model back then and had to wait a couple of weeks until I finally got my hands on mine.
Just like David Smith I was wondering how long I’ve been wearing my Apple Watch since then. Unfortunately I lost some of my health data while moving iPhones in September 2015. So the early days of wearing my Apple Watch models over the years have been lost forever. Thankfully David made the source code for his app that uses HealthKit information stored on your iPhone available publicly. You’ll need Xcode and a developer account to run it on your iPhone.
As I mentioned above, I don’t have the full five years of data available to me. This means my dataset starts on September 26th, 2015. As you can see, for the first few months I’ve been charging my Watch during the night, before starting to track my sleep in January 2017 using various apps over the years. For the past year, Sleep Watch has been taking care of this and I usually don’t have to do anything to start or end tracking. (I’m not sure how I lost some more information during July 2017, but apparently it’s gone; roughly 20 days are missing.)
Based on the first date of availability, April 24, 2015, I’ve been wearing my Watch for 34.735 of 43.886 possible hours. That’s 79,1 percent of the time. Looking at actual available data and me owning the watch for only a part of the total time this goes up to 86,1 percent. I expect this number will continue to grow in the coming months and years as Apple Watch becomes more and more self-contained and independent of an iPhone. Better efficiency will also mean that I don’t have to charge it as often and long. As a result it will be possible to wear it for a longer time every day. I’m also looking forward for Apple to add their own sleep tracking. The current apps are good, but I’m sure Apple will be able to do things in the future that current third party apps can’t.
Over the years I owned the original Apple Watch, Apple Watch Series 3, Series 4 and now Apple Watch Series 5*. Looking at battery life, Apple Watch Series 4 was the best model so far for me. I never quite get the same on-my-wrist-time with Series 5. Even turning off various features, even the always-on-display, didn’t help. I still have to charge it daily for longer than I’d like. Series 4 only needed a full charge every two or three days, while giving it a little bit of juice for a few minutes during the days in between. I do enjoy being able to glance at my Watch to get the current time, I wouldn’t want to miss this.
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