Apple Watch 7 might have a bigger battery, report claims

Quick, Apple Watch owners: Name the biggest flaw of your smartwatch!

I bet you answered battery life. With 18 hours of advertised battery life, you need to charge the Apple Watch 6 daily. Meanwhile, some competing smartwatches have several days or even weeks of battery life.

With Apple Watch 7, this might change for the better. A report from the Economic Daily News claims that the upcoming Apple smartwatch will come with a smaller "S7" chip, freeing up space for a larger battery.

The rest of the report lines up with a recent report from Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who said that Apple Watch 7 will have an updated, flatter design, with a narrower bezel, as well as ultra-wideband functionality, as seen in Apple AirTags.

In his report, Kuo said the new Watch will be slightly thicker than its predecessor, but he never mentioned battery life. But Kuo also said Apple will skip adding new health sensors, introducing them instead in the 2022 version of the Watch. Filling up the free space with a bigger battery sounds like a logical move for Apple.

The allure of an Apple Watch with more battery life cannot be understated. With Apple constantly adding more and more fitness features, a longer-lasting battery would help the new watch keep up with the demands of active users' lifestyles — not to mention finally catch up with the likes of Garmin's Vivoactive 4 or Fitbit's Versa 3, which offer 8- and 6-day battery life, respectively.

The Apple Watch 7 is likely to launch this fall.