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How long does Apple Watch take to charge?

How long and how much power does it take to charge Apple Watch using a Chargebus 1650 multi charger?

It took around 3 hours to fully charge the 42mm Apple Watch from a completely drained state to a fully charged state. With the power current peaking at 0.36 Amps. This is a third of the power that the iPhone uses to charge.

However, Apple watch continued to charge at a low 0.1 Amps even after being fully charged. This is why Apple watch can still feel warm to the touch after an overnight charge.

Apple Watch charging power over time.
Apple Watch charging power over time.
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How Big Is the 42mm Apple Watch Battery?

Here at Onefruit, we test all of our USB multi chargers with the latest Apple devices. With the launch of the Apple Watch, we couldn’t wait to test it with a 16 Port USB charger.

As a company who investigate a load of battery powered devices, we were curious to the capacity of Apple Watch’s battery. There has been many teardowns of Apple Watch, most notably by iFixit. They revealed that the 38mm Apple Watch had a battery capacity of 205mAh. For comparison, your iPhone 6 carries a 1,810mAh battery.

38mm Apple Watch Battery
38mm Apple Watch Battery

However, neither Google nor Apple could help with finding out the battery capacity of our 42mm Apple Watch which we were testing.

There are very few teardowns of the 42mm Apple Watch, I guess most people don’t want to open up the more expensive version. A website called TechRepublic did have 42mm Apple Watch teardown. Their photography was no where near the quality of iFixit making it difficult to read the numbers on the battery.

applewatchteardown18-2Luckily, the battery also has the watt-hour (Wh) number written on the back in a larger font. The 42mm Apple Watch battery has a capacity of 0.94Wh compare to 0.78Wh of the 38mm battery. But, what we really want is the milliampere-hour (mAh) number. For this we need the batteries voltage.

Apple Watch InsideAfter some sharping up in photoshop, you can just make out that the battery is running at 3.76 volts.

To convert watt-hour to milliampere-hour we must times the watt-hour (Wh) by a 1000, divided by the voltage in volts (V).

mAh = Wh x 1000 / V

250mAh = 0.94 (Wh) x 1000 / 3.76 

So the 42mm Apple Watch battery has a capacity of 250mAh compared to the 205mAh of the 38mm Apple Watch. This means the 42mm version has a 22% bigger battery then the 38mm.