Wesley's Tool-Box

I was quite surprised to see my Apple Watch Series 2 having more than 60% of battery on the first day of use. To see that this was not a fluke, I kept checking for a few more days and realized that it usually had 50% or more left after 24 hours with light use. In such cases, I was able to go without recharging for two full days. This is quite a bit longer than the Apple Watch Gen 1 even compared to its early days. So to make this clear, I did a comparative battery discharging test to produce the graph below. The devices had watchOS 3.0 installed at the time.


Apple Watch Gen 1 lasted 24 hours 45 minutes, while Series 2 worked for 38 hour 50 minutes, about 57% longer. For Series 2, it still effectively meant two days' use - have it fully charged on the morning of day 1 and it will last until late evening on day 2. You can also see that if there was less activity, 48-hour use would have been possible as well. What's more interesting is how much battery is consumed for certain activities.


During regular office work, the drain rate is similar for both watches. But once they're subject to more demanding tasks like logging an exercise or actively running apps, Gen 1 tends to drain about twice as fast. The idle state shown by the sleeping time is also less efficient compared to Series 2.

Early parts leak showed that Apple Watch Series 2 42mm models have about 36% larger battery compared to Gen 1 (334mAh, from 246mAh). So the difference isn't just coming from a larger battery, but an even more energy-efficient system overall. Considering that Series 2 has a CPU twice as fast and a screen twice as bright, this is quite a feat.

Now, it's been suggested that Apple put a larger battery on Series 2 because it includes a GPS module. This would enable path logging without a paired iPhone at an expense of a faster battery drain. So let's see how much difference it makes.

To compare the battery life of the Gen 1 and Series 2 Apple Watches in a fair manner, I wore both devices on the same arm for as long as the device's battery lasted. In doing so, I was also able to see if there were any differences in the logged activity data. I'll be talking about this first.

I should note that this test required carrying two iPhones, one for each watch. While Apple did introduce 'auto switch' feature in iOS 9.3 and watchOS 2.2 to let a user use multiple Apple Watches, only one watch can be active at a time. So to log the activities independently and simultaneously, I paired Series 2 to iPhone 7 Plus and Gen 1 to iPhone 7. The phones were in my pants so that they would always be close to the watches. Both had been through more than 20 minutes of calibration walks before the testing as well. Let's see what the final results of this walking session.


The calorie and heart rate measurements were nearly the same, meaning that both Apple Watches saw nearly the same amount of activity. This is assuring as the measurement back-end for the workout session is consistent across generations.

One of the reasons why the 1st generation (Gen 1) Apple Watch felt limited was due to its noticeably slow performance. App performance, especially the 3rd party ones, was sluggish enough that I eventually gave up making much use of them. The watchOS 3 update has implemented a lot of optimizations that alleviate the problem, but it couldn't hide the fact that the CPU simply was underpowered. Apple Watch Series 2 aimed to fix this by putting a CPU twice as powerful. Let's see if it worked out. First up is the boot speed. All tests were done with watchOS 3.0 installed.


Compared to iPhones or modern computers, Apple Watches are notoriously slow to boot up. Gen 1 still takes more than two minutes and while Series 2 is faster, it isn't significantly so. Fortunately, you won't need to reboot it often, so it's a minor annoyance at best. If you want to see the boot speed in real time, here's the boring video.

I wore my 1st generation Apple Watch Sport (some people call this first iteration Series 0; I will refer to it as Gen 1) every day for over 17 months from May 2015 to October 2016 until its duty was handed off to the Stainless Steel version of the Apple Watch Series 2. While it's still just as functional as the first day, some wear and tear are clearly visible as expected. The big scratch marks on the glass are from just two separate accidental brushes with a rough surface. Excepting those, it would have only gathered the small scratches at the edge of the screen.

Still, the big ones did made me buy the stainless steel version for the Series 2 since it has the much harder sapphire glass instead of the Ion-X hardened glass used on the aluminum (Sport) version. I'll see how better it would be in the coming months, but the lesson to be learned here probably is that if you're getting the Sport version, you might want to invest in a screen protection film.


Despite being only in contact with either my wrist or the charger, the back side of the Gen 1 watch sustained quite a bit of wear as well. The scratches started to appear on the center within about two months due to slight curvature difference between the charger, and the sweat likely aided in corroding the surface as well. While the scratches have not affected the functionality, it does make it look old and less durable.

It seems that Apple was aware of this issue and all Series 2 models got the much more durable ceramic back. For the Gen 1 and Series 1, the Sport version came with the composite back and the more expensive versions (stainless steel type and Edition) got the ceramic back. I would recommend avoiding the composite back if possible.

In Korea or Japan, loud camera shutter sounds from smartphones are a fact of life due to the voluntary standards for the camera-equipped cellphones meant to ease privacy concerns. Issues had already been raised as far back as 2001 in Japan and Korean government started taking action in 2003. These standards call for a mandatory shutter sound of certain loudness even in silent mode. In Korea, sound level is set to be between 60 and 68dBA.

Note that this is not mandated by law in either countries, so there is no legal repercussion for not honouring the standards. Still, it poses an annoyance in many legitimate circumstances, something that users in other countries would never encounter. Imagine that the phone will make a loud sound whenever you take a photo or a screenshot(!) even in silent mode. There are 3rd party camera apps that try to avoid the sound, but for the screenshots you would ultimately need a system-level hack. This means jailbreaking or finding an obscure bug/feature.

I noticed that this problem has been exacerbated on the iPhone 7 series because it is using two speakers instead of one. You'll now get to hear the noisy shutter sound even louder, in stereo. To get an objective picture of the situation, I brought out my iPhone collection for a round of sound level measurement for the camera shutter sound. Here's how they stacked up.


The test was done by measuring the sound using the "Decibel 10th" app on the iPad Pro 9.7". Tested iPhone was 40cm(16") away from the iPad's microphone. To human ears, an increase of 10dB is felt as the sound being twice as loud. This means that the integrated speaker got roughly two times louder since iPhone 5 onwards. Incidentally, this would've been necessary to meet the aforementioned Korean standards. The 60dB level must be attained at a distance of 1m(3.28'), and there is a decrease of 8dB for moving from 40cm to 1m. Taken together, it becomes obvious that the iPhone 4S and earlier models wouldn't be loud enough.

And as expected, iPhone 7 I bought in Japan was the loudest, even though the second speaker was facing away from the iPad's microphone. One consolation is that the sound heard by the subject isn't much louder than before; you only hear it as being much louder because the second speaker is facing you.

Meanwhile, the iPhones bought in the United States turned out to be relatively quieter even when the volume was set to the loudest. In fact, my iPhone 7 Plus had a very quiet shutter sound even though music playing on it was quite loud in contrast. This shows that Apple is intentionally boosting the speaker output beyond normal levels when the shutter sound is made on the Korean and Japanese models. It would be difficult for those who haven't used these models to realize how loud they are.

If you want to hear the difference for yourself, here's the video of the test that the results are from. If anyone had been wondering why I still try to get iPhones from the United States, this should be the answer.