Battery life with earbuds connected

[thewhitehart]

I use Beats Studio Buds+. When wearing my Series 9, I noticed that I can either connect directly to the earbuds by Airplay from the watch or control my iPhone as another device with the earbuds connected to the iPhone.

Is there a difference in battery life for the Apple Watch when doing that? I hope the watch is not using its cellular connection for Apple Music when I connect it directly to the earbuds, since I still have my iPhone nearby.

 

[Mackilroy]

There’s going to be some battery use, but in my experience, it’s minor. As for Apple Music, it’s only going to use the cellular connection if you’re specifically streaming through your Watch, and not through your phone.

 

[swandy]

There’s going to be some battery use, but in my experience, it’s minor. As for Apple Music, it’s only going to use the cellular connection if you’re specifically streaming through your Watch, and not through your phone.

No. You can download music to the Watch to prevent it from using cellular. I do that when exercising but also because the battery drain on my AW8 is less than using cellular for music streaming when I don’t want to take my iPhone along.

 

[Mackilroy]

Look at the context again, @swandy. This is in the context of streaming, not downloading music to the Watch itself. So, yes.

 

[Howard2k]

There’s going to be some battery use, but in my experience, it’s minor. As for Apple Music, it’s only going to use the cellular connection if you’re specifically streaming through your Watch, and not through your phone.

And even then it will only use cellular if it cannot see the phone via BT and has no active wifi.

In terms of battery efficiency, best to worst, I believe it’s something like:

* iPhone to earbuds and use Watch to control playlist of phone
* Watch playing downloaded music to earbuds
* Watch streaming music but using phone Internet connection via BT
* Watch streaming music but using Wifi
* Watch streaming music using cellular