“After nearly three weeks of wearing an Apple Watch, I’m finally settling into a routine,” Kevin Tofel reports for ZDNet. “And I’ve noticed a postive impact to my iPhone 6: Longer battery life.”
“I charge the watch each night and put it back on my wrist as soon as I wake up in the morning,” Tofel reports. “The way I use my phone, I never had a problem getting through single day with the iPhone. But I’d always charge it at night because the battery would typically be around the 20 percent capacity mark at day’s end. Now, it’s closer to 50 percent when I go to bed.”
“The only variable here is the addition of the Apple Watch,” Tofel reports. “The more activities you push from a phone to a watch, the less time the phone’s display is on. There is the added energy drain of getting that data moved between devices but with Bluetooth LE, it’s not nearly as much as using the display.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Today is our fourth week with Apple Watch. Our iPhone usage is way, way down and, consequently, our iPhone battery life is way, way up (from about 40% left at the end of a typical day to over 65%). We put our Apple Watches to bed every night with about 30-35% battery remaining.
One additional thing to consider: We have iPhone 6 Plus units. 128GB. We are Day One iPhone users for every new model. We’re now using the iPhone (directly) so much less often that any Apple Watch-compatible iPhone might suffice. The next iPhone will need to offer something(s) might attractive to get those who’d normally jump to the latest and greatest iPhone, but now find a lot of their attention has shifted from iPhone to Apple Watch, to make the leap.
Of course, we’ll get the next flagship iPhone as usual, but it’s not a stretch to think that Apple Watch might impact serial iPhone upgraders. At this point with Apple Watch, a smaller model iPhone already looks much more attractive to us. So, we’re (again) seeing a raison d’être for SMALLER iPhones: You can just squirrel it away. Apple Watch use will very likely affect iPhone buying decisions for many going forward.
In a nutshell: Before Apple Watch, we used our iPhones all the time and wanted the largest display and longest battery life possible. After Apple Watch, we use our iPhones less and size/weight (easy to carry) have become much more important to us; a smaller iPhone battery wouldn’t hinder us now with Apple Watch.
Luckily for Apple, only some 20% of U.S. iPhone users have currently upgraded to iPhone 6/Plus (and there are millions of potential Android switchers coming off contracts every day), so there is a lot of headroom for iPhone 6s/Plus sales this fall and for a long time thereafter.
It’s rather amazing how dramatically the Apple Watch has affected our iPhone usage after just one month. Eventually, Apple Watch will likely change the dynamics of iPhone model sales.