If you’re pondering of shopping for a brand new Apple Watch, there’s one thing you must know concerning the GPS monitoring. Apple has confirmed that the Apple Watch Series 8, second-gen SE, and Ultra received’t piggyback off your iPhone’s GPS sign in case your telephone is close by. Instead, all three will depend on their built-in GPS sensors. Older fashions, nonetheless, will nonetheless use your iPhone’s GPS when doable.

While this alteration wasn’t a secret, it flew underneath the radar due to flashier updates like Crash Detection, temperature sensors, and, nicely, the Ultra’s whole existence. However, DC Rainmaker — a well-respected sports activities and endurance tech reviewer — noticed that Apple made it official by including a line to an Apple Watch support page.

* Apple Watch Ultra, Series 8, and SE (2nd technology) use the built-in Apple Watch GPS even when your iPhone is close by. To protect battery life, older Apple Watch fashions use the GPS out of your iPhone when out there.

Older Apple Watches use your iPhone’s GPS when out there as a method to delay battery life. It is smart. Continuous GPS monitoring can considerably zap your battery, and the Apple Watch isn’t as helpful as a health tracker and smartwatch if it could actually’t make it by the day. If you’re already carrying your telephone alongside on an exercise, why not offload a extra power-intensive function to the bigger iPhone battery?

The drawback is that, by prioritizing your Apple Watch’s battery life, you make tradeoffs with GPS accuracy. Unless your telephone is all the time in your hand with nothing obscuring its GPS antenna’s view of the sky, your watch’s GPS might be a extra handy and correct possibility. As DC Rainmaker factors out, in case your telephone is in your backpack or buried deep in a pocket or bag, counting on its GPS sign could compromise accuracy. It’s very true for Ultra homeowners. The Ultra has multiband GPS, which implies it could actually entry each the L1 and L5 satellite tv for pc frequencies for extra correct GPS information in difficult environments like city cities and dense forests. If Apple had caught with the previous methodology, pairing the Ultra with something aside from the iPhone 14 Pro fashions (which also have multiband GPS) would possibly imply you’d inadvertently find yourself utilizing much less correct GPS tech. This ensures Ultra homeowners will all the time get multiband GPS.

But the large takeaway is that Apple appears rather more assured about battery life on its newest Apple Watches — each as standalone units and when used together with your telephone. For standalone exercise monitoring on mobile fashions, nothing’s actually modified right here. Meanwhile, in case you do carry your telephone with you, out of doors exercises received’t drain your telephone’s battery as a lot anymore. That’s a win from a security perspective, as GPS-only Apple Watches nonetheless depend on your telephone to make emergency calls. You can train outdoors longer with out having to maintain as shut a watch in your telephone battery. As for the watch’s battery, Apple additionally added a brand new low energy mode to watchOS 9 that prolongs battery life with out sacrificing GPS or coronary heart charge information.

Granted, that is most enjoyable in case you primarily use your Apple Watch for health. Even so, it’s one other small step towards erasing the road between smartwatches and health trackers completely. Right now, battery life is a giant motive why that delineation nonetheless exists. Fitness trackers can final a very long time however typically lack smarts, whereas smartwatches can do all of it as long as you dedicate about 2 % of your mind energy to sustaining a charging schedule. Not having to make a tradeoff between options and battery life? That’d be a plus for everybody — not simply athletes.