I have an Apple Watch Series 7 (45mm LTE). The battery life was never great — longevity has always been the weak link for Apple’s smartwatch — but it was manageable. Until WatchOS 10, when my battery life took a sudden nosedive.

Generally speaking, I could reliably count on around 24 hours of use per charge of my Apple Watch. This was important for two reasons:

1. I use my Apple Watch for sleep tracking, which it needs to remain alive to… do.
2. I could charge my watch every morning and have it last again until the same time the next day.

With WatchOS 10, I am lucky to see 18-20 hours of battery life on the Apple Watch. This means when I charge it up between 7-8AM most mornings, it no longer has enough juice to make it through a night of sleep tracking. So, I have to charge it at night now, too. Twice a day! If I charge the watch only in the evening, it’s dead by late afternoon, making an Apple Watch charger an even more critical part of my travel kit.

This is not good! I do not like it! Bad!

Note: This post contains no “answer” as to why WatchOS 10 reduces the battery life of older Apple Watches. But if you want pure speculation: A ton of changes at the OS level cumulatively result in more system wakeups and CPU usage that make older, less-efficient Apple Watches consume significantly more power. But that’s just A Guess. And I’ve no earthly idea what Apple could do to mitigate the impact of these changes.

And to nip this in the bud: No, Apple does not “intentionally” reduce the performance or usability of older products with updates to make you buy new ones. To put it kindly, that’s a Very Silly Thing to believe when Apple’s whole brand is built on retaining the trust and satisfaction of its customers over many generations of a variety of Very Expensive products. But Apple does pay far less attention to optimizing those updates for older products, and WatchOS 10 appears to be the death blow to my aging Series 7 LTE use case as an always-worn smartwatch-plus-sleep tracker. (Most folks probably don’t wear their watch when they sleep, and so this loss of battery life may go unnoticed by many. Similarly, my LTE watch was already down on battery life compared to the more common Wi-Fi variant.)

There’s no way to roll your watch back to WatchOS 9, and I wouldn’t even if I could — you’re just asking for bugs by staying on old software. You can have the watch’s battery replaced by Apple for a $100 fee, but here’s the thing: There’s no way I can know that replacing the battery will get the battery life back to where it needs to be for me. It would be a guess. And for a hundred bucks? I’ll pass. 

I’m left with three potential solutions: 

1. Stop using my watch as a sleep tracker.
2. Drop a serious wad of cash on a new Apple Watch.
3. Stop using my Apple Watch altogether. (This goes without saying, but: I’m a pedant.)

None are enticing. I want the sleep tracking, but I have zero interest in upgrading my watch. As much as I like the Apple Watch as a product, the value I’d derive from any of the new features or capabilities in the latest version would be marginal at best. I don’t care about body temperature monitoring, the enhanced phone finding accuracy, or a brighter display. (And before someone suggests buying an Ultra for the battery life: No. Ugly. Gross.) 99.5% of my use case for the Apple Watch is passive — I want it to collect health data, tell me the time, and occasionally be my timer or alarm clock. Only the activity and health tracking actually feel dependent on the wrist-worn form factor, and Apple isn’t the only game in town there. As for being an alarm clock, timer, or … a watch? I can use my phone or AirPods; it’s not a big deal — the watch is replaceable with slightly less-optimal solutions. I could live with that.

So I’ll probably stop using the sleep tracking. That’s a real bummer, because it’s a feature I’ve come to appreciate on the Apple Watch. It’s one I could live without, though, and I’d rather have a functional Apple Watch during the daytime hours than a sleep tracker at night.

Anyway, if you were wondering if your Apple Watch suddenly developed craptacular battery life in WatchOS 10 or if you were just losing your mind: I am strongly suspicious it’s the former.