After updating my iPhone to IOS17, I updated my Apple Watch to WatchOS 10. This is a significant update that makes major changes in the interface. So, don’t do it unless you have some time to play around with it.
After the watch starts, it may take 30 minutes or so for all apps to reload. I made the mistake of trying to use the watch immediately and picked a bit when I saw that many complications were missing from my commonly used watch faces. It did eventually get sorted out.
Apple has repurposed the Side Button so that one tap now shows the Control Center (formerly accessed by scrolling down from the watch face. The Dock where you could make up to 10 apps available via a tap (after tapping the side button) is no longer aavailable.
Scrolling up from the wath face now lets you view Watch widgits. These are very much like other Apple widgits in providing quick access to various functions defined by the apps. You have only limited ability to customize the order after enalbling then (i.e. the only way to force a widgit to a top position is to pin it).
The replacemnt of the Dock by widgits caused me a bit of panic, as an app that I accessed regularly via the Dock does not have any widgits yet. Fortunately, I was able to put a complication for that function on an appropriate watch face and access the app it replaced with a pinned widgit.
So, be careful and allow some extra time for this update.
Completely agree. It’s going to take a bit to get used to new functionality. I’m sad at the loss of the dock, as I used it often, and use control center so infrequently that dedicating it to the side button seems like a waste of potential.
On the other hand, the new Modular Ultra face is great. It looks better than Modular, it adds seconds (optionally) to a second digital watch face (only Activity Digital had it previously), and adds more complications and an option to turn red when ambient light is low (or you can keep it red.)
Though I haven’t tried it yet, I’m also happy that Fitness+ has the ability to stack workouts. Sometimes I want to do 40 minutes of a cycling workout and I’ll do two 20 minute workouts, or a 30 and a 10, and now I can pre-plan that. I think…
I also switched to Modular Ultra yesterday on my Ultra. One thing I’d like to be able to change but can’t find a way to is the altitude scale on the bezel. I don’t really need it to go up to 10000 ft. I live at 1200 ft, routinely go up to 2400 ft, but that’s about it. I’d like to be able to set the maximum altitude displayed on the bezel. The other problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to calibrate the altimeter on the watch. At the moment it’s off by about 40 ft.
I did pair a cycling power meter (my Tacx Neo 2 smart trainer) to the Watch, so that works. It offered extended display on the iPhone as well, although I didn’t (and likely will never) do a cycling activity with the watch so I couldn’t try it out. (In any event, I’m never going to mount my iPhone on handlebars.) Maps does not have the promised trails yet (at all), and doesn’t have topo lines, although it does have relief shading so you can see the mountains if you’re zoomed out far enough.
I hope Jeff Carlson comes out with an updated Watch Take Control book to cover the changes. I’m getting tired of Apple making changes just to say they did something. They always seem to trash something I’ve setup the way I like it so that I can never get it back like it was.
Does anyone understand the Optimized Battery Charging? My wife and I have the Series 7 watches. I don’t know if Optimized Charging was an option before this release, but I never experienced it before. Both of our watches have this turned on. I use my watch a lot during the day, and now, if I do a workout and play some tunes into my airpods, it dies before dinner time because it didn’t fully charge overnight. When I put it on the charger (dead or close to it), it says something like charging to the optimized limit and stops at 80%. I can tap the charge ring and select Charge to full, and it does, but that wasn’t required before OS 10. My wife’s watch isn’t used heavily, and when she puts her’s on the charger, at about the 50% mark, it says charging to full. It seems like her’s should be only charging to 80%.
Optimized charging watches your charge behavior and will do a best-guess of when to charge to full and when to charge and hold at 80%, I believe to try to reduce the loss of battery health over time. Since your wife doesn’t charge regularly, like you do, it doesn’t do the charge and hold - her charging is not regular.
Probably the best thing for you may be to turn the feature off in settings / battery / battery health (on the watch - this setting is not in the watch app), though be aware that you’ll likely lose battery health a bit faster than you might have.
Another option when the app has no widget is to create a Shortcut that launches the app and then add that Shortcut as a widget. This was a better solution than a complication for me because I also like to use that app within a certain Focus. So I wrapped launching the app and switching to that Focus into one widget.
Thanks for the tip. I do sleep tracking via the Autosleep app with the Lights Out function to track how long it takes me to fall asleep. Since my bedtime is not fixed, I manually turn on Sleep Focus after tapping Lights Out. So, I created a Watch Shortcut to do both and added it to my watch widgets.
I upgraded my Apple Watch Nike SE a few days ago and have had a problem with shortened battery life since. I’m getting a Low Power warning less than 12 hours after charging and all I’m doing is occasionally looking at notifications and the weather. “Optimize Battery” is enabled but it’s been saying it’s charged to 100%. In settings, it says the battery’s Max Capacity is 93%, which sounds pretty good.
When I see sudden unusual battery drain, sometimes just a simple power cycle of the watch solves it; sometimes I also power cycle the phone. (It doesn’t happen often.)
Another thing to try is Watch app, General / Reset / Reset sync data - sometimes the calendar and contact data gets corrupted, resulting in an infinite sync (there is no visibility to this.)
The most radical thing to try if neither of these help is to unpair the watch and pair again.
As I understand it, (on my phone, not a watch) optimized charging tries to minimize the amount of fast-charging (which can reduce the lifespan of a battery), while still ensuring that your device is fully charged when you remove it from its charger.
To do this, it tracks the times when your device is typically charging (e.g. on your nightstand while you’re sleeping, or on a desk stand in your office while you’re working). If it detects a pattern (e.g. remove it every day at 7:30am), then it will adjust its charging based on that.
So if, for example, there are 5 hours before you will disconnect the charger, and at your current battery level it will take 2 hours to fast-charge to full, but 8 hours to slow-charge, it might decide to fast-charge for 1 hour and then slow-charge for the remaining 4, so it’s at 100% when you need it.
This is an oversimplification, but that’s the general idea.
If optimized charging is not applicable (e.g. your charging cycles don’t fit into a usable pattern, or you disabled the feature or you’re not charging it during your usual charging times), then it will fall back to a default algorithm of some kind (e.g. fast-charge to 80%, then slow-charge until full).
Two days ago, I first posted about optimized charging. That overnight period when it was on the charger, it only charged to 75%. So, yesterday, starting with only a 75% charge, my watch went into low power mode around 6:30 p.m. and was dead around 10:00. When I put it on the charger, it rebooted after about 30 minutes. This morning, it was charged to 100%. I still have optimized charging on and will keep watching what happens. My battery health says 84%.
