Busting open the Apple Watch Series 3 reveals a new, larger battery
The Apple Watch Series 3 has been widely available for a few days now, bringing Apple fans cellular service on their wrists for the first time ever.
Apple had to add some new wrinkles to the Apple Watch to bring the new feature to the same familiar 42mm and 38mm casings we've seen in previous generations of the device. Naturally, the repair jockeys over at iFixit got their hands on the new watch, cracked it open, and poked around to see what makes it (metaphorically) tick.
The teardown uncovered the tech that brings connectivity to the Watch — and also revealed how Apple was able to improve the battery.
The Series 3 internals haven't changed drastically from the Series 2, minus the addition of the new LTE antenna array beneath the screen. This shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, since the wearables look identical save for the telling red dot on the Series 3's crown.
There was another key difference, however: the Series 3's expanded battery capacity. iFixit's engineers found the unit has a 1.07 watt-hours (279 mAh at 3.82 V) capacity, which is a four percent increase from the Series 2's battery and 32 percent more than the original Apple Watch from 2015. That beefed-up capacity has paid off; we found the Series 3 consistently fulfills Apple's promise of 18 hours per charge (without heavy LTE or GPS use) in our review of the device.
The iFixit crew found some new RF chips in the Watch, which likely provide the device its new LTE functionality. The air vent has also been moved over to the bottom of the device, next to the diagnostic port. Curiously, the teardown made no mention of the second-gen W2 Bluetooth/Wi-Fi chip.
The device earned a middling score on iFixit's repairability scale, garnering a six out of 10. Replacing the screen and battery were deemed difficult, but do-able — but you'd probably be better off going straight to Apple if your new watch takes some damage.
Topics Apple Watch
Brett Williams is a Tech Reporter at Mashable. He writes about tech news, trends and other tangentially related topics with a particular interest in wearables and exercise tech. Prior to Mashable, he wrote for Inked Magazine and Thrillist. Brett's work has also appeared on Fusion and AskMen, to name a few. You can follow Brett on Twitter @bdwilliams910.
