Apple Watch Series 3 teardown finds a bigger battery and few surprises

Enlarge (credit: iFixit)

After breaking apart Apple’s new iPhone 8 last week, popular gadget repair site iFixit released a teardown of the LTE-enabled Apple Watch Series 3 on Monday.

Given that the just-released wearable looks a great deal like its predecessor—big red dot aside—it shouldn’t be surprising to hear that it doesn’t have many major changes on the inside. There’s a new suite of RF chips presumably in place to handle LTE connectivity and a “slightly modified” charging coil to support Qi wireless chargers. But for the most part, the Series 3 is laid out similarly to the Series 2 before it.

iFixit says that the Series 3 does come with a slightly stronger battery, though: it has a 1.07Whr unit, a 4-percent increase over the 1.03Whr battery in the Series 2. That’s a very modest gain, though any extra juice should be welcome with the added strain that cellular connectivity puts on a battery. Since the new Watch isn’t significantly thicker than the Series 2, it seems that Apple is banking on its chips being more efficient to keep the device’s battery life from being totally anemic.