Technologies

Apple Watch Battery Hacks That’ll Get You More Hours on a Charge

Seven settings you can tweak right now to add at least two more hours of battery life.

Charging my electronics at the end of each day was just as part of my routine as brushing my teeth. I’d set my iPhone and Apple Watch on their chargers, power down my screens and settle in for a night free of tracking and notifications.

That is, until sleep tracking complicated everything. The Apple Watch can record several important health metrics during sleep and look for indicators of sleep apnea, hypertension and even early signs of illness. It’s gotten too good to ignore.

My biggest challenge with this new sleeping arrangement has been battery life. The Apple Watch needs at least seven consecutive nights of sleep tracking to start analyzing the data. And even though the current Series 11 and last year’s Series 10 can last through a full day and a night of sleep tracking, they leave me with a dead watch around lunchtime if I don’t recharge.

After too many days of not receiving credit for midday workouts and obsessively watching the battery percentage drop, I began searching for every trick to maximize my Apple Watch’s battery life. And I’m guessing I’m not alone. Here’s what’s helped.

1. Charge as fast as possible

The first thing you can do without sacrificing any features is make sure you’re actually getting full fast charging speeds. The Series 10, Series 11, SE 3 and Ultra 3 all support superfast charging, but I realized I wasn’t using the right wattage wall adapter.

Apple doesn’t include a charging brick anymore, so if you plug your cable into whatever spare charger that’s lying around your kitchen (like me), you’re probably not charging your watch as quickly as you could. Apple recommends a 20-watt or higher USB-C power adapter, which should charge newer models from empty to full in less than an hour or provide enough juice for a full night of sleep tracking in five minutes — about as long as it takes to brush your teeth.

2. Gain a few more hours with a small trade-off

Extending your battery won’t come without some compromises, but the easiest sacrifice for me is turning off «Wake on Wrist Raise» and «Wake on Crown Rotation» in Settings. On watches with an always-on display, this simply means the screen remains in its dimmer «resting» state until you tap it intentionally, rather than lighting up every time you move your wrist or brush the crown.

It won’t work on older models that lack an always-on display, but if you have a compatible watch, it can easily add 4 extra hours of use. The only caveat is that you won’t see your notifications immediately. You’ll still receive the haptic alert, but you’ll need to tap in to view the notification, rather than simply tilting your wrist to see it appear.

To disable it, open the Settings app, go to Display & Brightness and then scroll all the way to the bottom and toggle off both options.

3. Dim the lights

Lower your screen brightness — it’s another small trade-off, but only on a sunny day. The watch comes out of the box with its brightness set around two-thirds of its peak level. The screen’s brightness will automatically adjust based on your environment, but you can force it to stay at the lowest setting. In the Display & Brightness settings, reduce the Brightness level to one bar.

Dimming your watch’s display can add one or two extra hours of battery life between charges, depending on where you spend your day and how often the screen wakes. The only times I miss having a bright screen are during outdoor runs in blazing sun. But sacrificing brightness for a longer battery life is by no means a deal-breaker.

4. Go for a bare-bones watch face

Switching to a simpler watch face can also help squeeze more life out of the battery. The more pixels your watch has to light up (think photo faces) or the more animation involved (hello, Memojis), the faster your battery drains. The same applies to constantly updating complications, such as the weather or your heart rate.

Apple doesn’t offer a battery-use score for its watch faces the way some Android watches do, but as a general rule of thumb, darker, simpler faces with fewer active elements last the longest. My go-tos are Activity Digital, which displays only my rings, or X-Large, which shows only the numbers.

5. Getting through Day 2 will cost you

A few extra hours of battery life are great, but sometimes even that isn’t enough to get me through the day. My biggest issue is running out of juice when I’m away from home and a charger is nowhere to be found. Even if your weekday routine includes an office charge, weekends are unpredictable, and it’s best to make it to the evening when you’re closer to your charger.

For me, the next-level compromise is turning off the always-on display. You’ll need to raise your wrist to wake the screen, but this feature can add up to 6 hours of battery life, depending on your model.

To turn it off, go to Settings, then select Display & Brightness and toggle off Always-On. Note that it also affects workouts, so if you prefer training with your heart rate zones or other stats visible at a glance, this might not be the best option.

6. Turn on low power mode as a last resort

If I really need to squeeze every last drop of battery life, I switch to low power mode once when the watch hits 15%. It’s actually easier to toggle on and off than the always-on display, since it’s accessible in the control panel via the side button. Tap the Battery Percentage button, then tap Low Power Mode.

Low power mode does more than just disable the always-on screen. It also delays notifications (only slightly), turns off auto-start for workouts (so you’ll need to start them manually) and pauses background measurements. Heart rate zone alerts, high/low and irregular rhythm notifications, and loud environment alerts are all disabled, too. However, during a workout, heart rate and pace are still measured.

7. Check the health of your battery

If you’re still experiencing poor battery life after trying all these troubleshooting tricks, it may simply be time to check your battery’s health. Even with the best habits, a worn-down battery can only do so much, and at some point an upgrade or replacement is the only real fix.

Older models tend to show wear sooner, but it’s not guaranteed. Charging patterns and overall use can take a toll on newer models, too. Having Apple replace the battery costs about $99, or you can put that money toward a newer model, like the SE 3, which starts at $249. If you have AppleCare Plus and your battery capacity is below 80%, the repair or replacement (if needed) is included.

To check your battery health, go to Settings> Battery, tap Battery Health, then scroll down to Maximum Capacity. Anything around or below 80% can start to cause noticeable issues.

Which Apple Watch model you have also matters for battery life

If you decide upgrading is your best choice, the Apple Watch Ultra line (especially the Ultra 3) offers the longest battery life by far. Apple says 42 hours per charge but I consistently hit closer to 48 hours without disabling features. The Series 11 is rated for up to 24 hours, although I typically get about 30 hours with a full night of sleep tracking and a 40-minute GPS workout.

Apple doesn’t advertise it, but larger-sized models generally last about two hours longer than smaller ones — so the 46mm Series 11 outperforms the 42mm. Models like the SE 3 or the Series 10 and older are rated for 18 hours with the always-on display enabled but I’ve pushed mine past the 22-hour mark.

Whatever mix of tricks you use (or whichever new model you start fresh with), here’s hoping you crack the battery routine and get the full benefit of everything the Apple Watch can do for your health.

Technologies

1000xResist Studio’s Next Indie Game Asks: Can You Convince an AI It Isn’t Human?

Perhaps the most relevant game for the ChatGPT era.

If you’re flustered at how much AI chatbots chat like humans, there’s an upcoming indie game with your name on it.

During the Triple-i Initiative showcase in early April, the studio Sunset Visitor (creators of 1000xResist) unveiled its next title, Prove You’re Human. The narrative game puts players in the role of a person trying to convince an AI that they aren’t human — and with a creative team full of former performance artists, it’ll get pretty existential from there.

The trailer is evocative yet scarce on details, which is fitting for the first look at a game that doesn’t have a release date yet. Given the indie success of Sunset Visitor’s debut title about cloning and personhood, 1000xResist, expectations are high for another cerebral narrative. And as the first game under the new publishing arm of Black Tabby Games (makers of indie hit Slay the Princess), the game is sparking a lot of hope.

In a conversation with the Sunset Visitor founder, Remy Siu, I delved into Prove You’re Human, asking the crucial question: What even is this game? And while they’re not releasing too many details right now or even hinting at when it’ll be released, we talked plenty about how a science fiction game inspired by the hit TV show Severance and the rise of generative AI speaks to the moment we’re all living in — where people chatting with ChatGPT succumb to AI psychosis and AI proselytizers claim the technological singularity of true artificial intelligence is near.

Prove You’re Human «is a game where an AI dares to dream that she’s human, and you’ve been hired to put her in her place,» Siu said. «And by you, [I mean] you the player who has undergone an operation to split their consciousness into two: one virtual consciousness, and then what we’ve been calling your corporeal other, your meat body that continues to exist outside doing things.»

See what I meant about Severance?

As with the show, Prove You’re Human uses these layers of existence to comment on work selves versus outside-world selves. And as you’d expect for a group of former performance artists, there’s pageantry in this divide, with your digital work self (the one controlled by the player, rendered in 3D), who is occasionally sent messages from your outside self, which are depicted in full-motion video. (That’s the real-life video we see in the trailer.)

«She gets to have all of her dreams come true, and you are the version of yourself that is now trapped here doing all of the work,» said Abby Howard, co-founder of Black Tabby Games and the new Black Tabby Publishing arm.

«It’s an examination of our relationship with work in the year 2026. If you’re working for a corporation now, does the you that is spending time in the office get to enjoy the fruits of that labor?» said Tony Howard-Arias, also co-founder of Black Tabby Games.

In another reflection of our current reality, specifically AI in gaming in 2026, I asked if generative AI tools are being used in Prove Your Human’s development, either to generate code or assets. «It’s definitely not ending up in the game,» Siu said, while lamenting that AI tools are baked into usage on things as mundane as Google searches. Howard asserted that they just don’t engage with those tools or have a use for them, at Black Tabby Games.

«We make a conscious effort to not engage with this wherever possible,» Howard-Arias said. «But how do your eyes not fall on the automated Google summary at the top of your search results?»

Engaging with AI — and choosing what’s real

As a narrative game, players will spend time in Prove You’re Human engaging with the AI, called Mesa, to hopefully convince her that she’s not human. Appropriately, there’s another mechanic players will use to interact with the world around them: hold up a CAPTCHA window and select the boxes that aren’t real. Through this tool — again, Siu was vague to hide story details — players will engage with the concept of what is real and what isn’t. And like other aspects of the game, there’s a deep philosophy behind using a tool to declare the truth of things.

«Every CAPTCHA is asking the player to commit an act of violence. You have to choose whether something is a thing or not,» Siu said. «That kind of thing is unpacked in these conversations with the artificial intelligence.»

Indie games have engaged with the ethical quandary of seemingly simple binary decisions resulting in devastating consequences. The iconic 2014 game Papers, Please had players working as a low-level border patrol agent approving or denying entry, choosing whether to save your job at the expense of dooming people to horrible fates. Prove You’re Human seems like it will use CAPTCHAs to similarly challenge players to make tough choices.

«One of the very first CAPTCHAs Remy showed us during his pitch was an image of a group of soldiers holding guns, and it said ‘select all boxes that contain arms in them,'» Howard-Arias said. «So it’s with the context provided an unanswerable question that puts you in a complicated position that causes some disquiet.»

I pointed out that using CAPTCHAs will likely date this game as being from a specific era, and Siu agreed that a decade from now we might use different, more complex verification tools. But he’s sanguine that the game will look and feel like it came from 2026. Art is defined by the contexts and time in which they’re made, he pointed out.

«I do want people playing 10 years from now, when they’re playing this game, to understand what we were thinking in this particular time,» Siu said.

Why indie games are the best medium for pondering AI

Similar to how Prove You’re Human results from our current anxieties around AI in 2026, Sunset Visitor’s first game, 1000xResist, is a product of 2020. It was developed during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic — indeed, Siu says it wouldn’t exist without the pandemic, as the early-pandemic themes of isolation and connection found their way into the game.

Half a decade later, the world has shifted its focus to a new era of smarter AI, financial inequality and labor issues. «For us at the studio, we’re always trying to make games that accompany you through life, and also is very porous with the world in which it’s made,» Siu said.

While Prove You’re Human is engaging with our current reality, telling a story about AI ensconces the game in the grand tradition of science fiction and its forays into artificial intelligence. There’s tension in adding to a proud tradition of theoretical yarns about smart entities we may one day create while living in 2026 during the actualization of it, Siu says.

Science fiction has plenty of overlap among AI, personhood and labor concerns, from Fritz Lang’s seminal Metropolis to Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot to Severance. Siu hinted that there are «things that Severance has left on the table that I would love to get at in this game.» While there are parallels with that show, he added that Sunset Visitor was more influenced by the animated series Pantheon, which deals with consciousness uploaded to digital networks and the value of work created by an artificial being.

«Games as an artistic medium almost beg questions about the nature of self and consciousness in the immersive way we interact with and embody a character,» Howard-Arias said.

The most popular science fiction video games have been titles from large-scale AAA developers like the Mass Effect and Dead Space franchises, which have world-building elements and story beats common to sci-fi subgenres (space opera and space horror, respectively). Prove You’re Human is an indie game made at a smaller scale with far more philosophical underpinnings. Indie games have more leeway to investigate themes and gameplay further from the mainstream, Siu said, allowing its developers to go the distance in ways that can cater to an audience unsatisfied by games from AAA developers.

«I do think this game, first and foremost, is for audiences which are narrative psychos, people who really want to see how narrative is being played with, unobstructed by a lot of concerns that larger developers may have,» Siu said. «Hopefully that creates something that you can’t get anywhere else.»

Sunset Visitor’s first release, 1000xResist, found an audience of gamers who engaged it with depth and nuance to a degree that surprised Siu, bucking the assumption that they’d only get such attention from fans of film or traditional fine and performing arts spaces.

In developing Prove You’re Human, he’s more optimistic about what levels of complexity players will engage with. That desire for deeper games has aligned Sunset Visitor with Black Tabby Publishing, and Siu noted the value of having Abby and Tony, the makers of the successful narrative game Slay the Princess, collaborate on his studio’s next game from a very early stage of development.

«The only way to foster this sort of love of literature within the audience, and the only way to grow the medium, is to make challenging works,» Howard-Arias said.

Technologies

Should You Keep Your Phone Plugged In Overnight? Sure, If You Want to Kill the Battery

It’s not completely necessary to leave your phone plugged in overnight, even if it makes you feel better.

If you cling to the comfort of a phone charged all the way to 100%, you may be inadvertently killing your battery. While it feels like you’re starting the day prepared, you could be «cooking» the battery, so to speak, from the inside out. Lithium-ion cells are under the most physical stress at the very top and bottom of their range, so that nightly charging session is basically forcing your hardware to age twice as fast as it should.

Keeping a lithium-ion cell pinned at 100% creates voltage stress, and the heat generated from sitting on a charger could end up meaning the difference between keeping your current phone a little longer or having to buy a new one. So once and for all, does keeping your phone plugged in really hurt the battery? Here’s what the experts suggest.

It isn’t about immediate damage but rather how fast your battery ages over time. Understanding the difference between what will and won’t break your phone is key. Here is the truth about your charging habits.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

The science behind battery wear

Battery health is not just about how many times you charge your phone. It is also about how it manages voltage, temperature and maintenance. Lithium-ion batteries age fastest when they are exposed to extreme levels: 0% and 100%.

Keeping these batteries near full charge for long stretches of time puts additional voltage stress on the cathode and electrolyte. This is why many devices use «trickle charging» or temporarily pause at 100%, topping up only when needed.

Still, the biggest threat is not overcharging, but heat. When your phone is plugged in and running demanding apps, it produces heat that accelerates chemical wear inside the battery. If you are gaming, streaming or charging on a hot day, that extra warmth does far more harm than leaving the cable plugged in overnight.

What Apple does about phone charging

The Apple battery guide describes lithium-ion batteries as «consumable components» that naturally lose capacity over time. To slow that decline, iPhones use Optimized Battery Charging, which learns your daily routine and pauses charging at about 80% until just before you typically unplug, reducing time spent at high voltage.

Apple also advises keeping devices between 0 to 35 degrees Celsius (32 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit) and removing certain cases while charging to improve heat dissipation. You can read more on the official Apple battery support page.

What Samsung (and other Android makers) do

Samsung offers a similar feature called Battery Protect, found in the One UI battery and device care settings. When enabled, it caps charging at 85%, which helps reduce stress during long charging sessions.

Other Android makers like Google, OnePlus and Xiaomi include comparable options — often called Adaptive Charging, Optimized Charging or Battery Care — that dynamically slow power delivery or limit charge based on your habits. These systems make it safe to leave your phone plugged in for extended periods without fear of overcharging.

When constant charging can hurt

Even with these safeguards, some conditions can accelerate battery wear. As mentioned before, the most common culprit is high temperatures. Even for a short period of time, leaving your phone charging in direct sunlight, in a car or under a pillow can push temperatures into unsafe zones.

Heavy use, such as gaming or 4K video editing, while charging can also cause temperature spikes which can degrade the battery faster. And cheap, uncertified cables or adapters may deliver unstable current that stresses cells. If your battery is already several years old, it will naturally be more sensitive to this kind of strain.

A smarter way to charge a phone

There is no need to overhaul your habits, but a few tweaks can help your battery age gracefully. Start by turning on the optimization tools on your phone: Optimized Battery Charging on iPhones, Battery Protect on Samsung devices and Adaptive Charging on Google Pixels. These systems learn your routine and adjust charging speed so your phone is not sitting at 100% all night.

Keep your phone cool while charging. According to Apple, phone batteries perform best between 62 and 72 degrees Fahrenheit (16 to 22 degrees Celsius). If your phone feels hot, remove its case or move it to a better ventilated or shaded spot. Avoid tossing your phone under a pillow or too close to other electronics, like your laptop. Skip wireless chargers that trap heat overnight. Use quality chargers and cables from your phone manufacturer or trusted brands. Those cheap «fast-charge» kits you find online often deliver inconsistent current, which can cause long-term issues.

Finally, try not to obsess over topping off the charge. It is perfectly fine to plug in your phone during the day for short bursts. Lithium-ion batteries actually prefer frequent, shallow charges rather than deep full cycles. There is no need to keep it between 20% and 80% all the time, but just avoid extremes when possible.

The bottom line

Keeping your phone plugged in overnight or on your desk all day will not destroy its battery. That is a leftover myth from a different era of tech. Modern phones are smart enough to protect themselves, and features such as Optimized Battery Charging or Battery Protect do most of the heavy lifting for you.

Still, no battery lasts forever. The best way to slow the inevitable is to manage heat, use quality chargers and let the software on your phone do its job. Think of it less as «babying» your battery and more as charging with intention. A few mindful habits today can keep your phone running strong for years to come.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Sunday, April 19

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for April 19

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? Read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.