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| Image from Apple https://www.apple.com/apple-watch-series-8/ |
New $399 + 40 sales tax smartwatch by Apple, Made in Vietnam, Designed in California, USA, the Series 8 Apple Watch GPS in Midnight Black Aluminum. Darn, that SE was going great & I really liked it, but it died a tragic death in an accident early this morning on Saturday 10/1/2022
The 16 month old Apple Watch SE was badly damaged in an accident that shattered the screen & caused a slow progressive thermal runaway of the battery, rending it a crispy bit of e-waste that I gave to the local Apple store for E-waste recycling.
It smelled of fried integrated circuit, burned electronics ribbon cable & toasted thermal runaway damage LIPO battery swelling & venting with flame & smoke. Think a nasty fried electronics smell, sorta like burning hair but more chemical pungent gross smell.
The smartwatch killing impact damage happened while I was stretching out after a 8 rep set on the leg extension machine at the gym early in the morning, shorty after waking up & enjoying my espresso. I was reaching up to stretch out & loosen up by leaning back & forth with my arms stretching upward toward the ceiling when my right wrist hit a sharp metal corner of the lifting machine with enough force to smash the display glass inward & puncture the battery, which I quickly noticed was heating up on my wrist.
I loosened the $8 Milanese loop amazon special SS band & removed the critically damaged Apple Watch SE. I quickly existed the building & got about 15 feet from the building when the unit started smoking. I was holding it by the steel mesh band. I released the band & dropped the now hot main unit onto wet soil that's irrigated by a lawn watering system very early in the morning. It was around 50 F outside at the time, around 6:30am. I let the AWSE continue venting smoke & soot, no flame was actually seen. After about 10 minutes the shorting battery reaction was over.
I collected the burnt Apple Watch SE with a pet waste bag & decided to go to the local Apple Store to recycle it, thankfully they accepted the destroyed unit. I quickly reviewed the recently launched Apple Watch 8, Apple Watch SE2, and Apple Watch Ultra units in the display tables, read the spec comparison & decided on the Midnight Aluminum GPS 41mm Apple Watch 8 for $399+ $40 of sales tax & out the door. It came with a USB to fast MagSafe charger, so I had to return home to charge it. I don't have any USB-C chargers in my 05 Prius. I plugged the USB-C end of the Apple Watch Fast Charger into our M2 MacBook Pro via one of its two bidirectional power USB-C ports.
I placed the Apple Watch 8 onto its inductive magnetic charging cable adapter & used my iPhone SE2 to set it up. Thankfully the settings on the AWSE had backed up to iCloud with its settings & all those settings transferred to the new AWS8 within a few minutes as it updated the software. I authenticated it on my phone & computer to like to my Apple account. It was to 100% charge within 25 minutes, when I mounted it to my wrist, its now my daily smartwatch. I am using Olga's old black Milanese loop band so it matches the "Midnight" "Black" anodized aluminum case of the new AWS8.
After testing the AWS8 for a couple of days, I can tell you that the USB-C to MagSafe puck inductive charger gives up to 8 hours of charge with just 8 minutes of charging. The fast charging only works if its plugged into a 3 amp or better USB-C power adapter, if the state of charge above 15% & below 60%. Furthermore, charging slows down at it approaches 80% & the top 20% to 100% the slowest part as the charging reduces current progressively to reduce internal heating of the lithium polymer battery to enhance its useful life.
Apple Watches are cool in the sense that you can replace the batteries when the battery does not hold a charge well anymore. Sadly, it involves heating & carefully removing the screen which also destroys the water sealing gasket which is hard to replace correctly to restore the WR50 property, so I highly suggest watching a How to change battery in Apple Watch 8 video on YouTube before trying yourself to do this repair. You can buy the tools & parts & battery replacement on ifixit.com, they also have repair guide with step by step instructions with pictures & images to help you complete the repair successfully. Some repair shops can do the battery replacement or screen replacement in Apple Watches & you can always bring your watch to Apple for an official repair, though that tends to be the most expensive pathway!
Wow, the sensors upgraded with 3rd generation heart rate tracking, SpO2 or pulse oximetry or blood oxygen saturation, ECG heart rhythm graphing, improved gyroscope & accelerometer sensors chips able to detect falls & car crashes. Better sleep tracking, better fitness tracking, better heart rate tracking, it even features a skin temperature sensor that improves sleep analytics since body temperature drops during the N4 deep wave sleep phased where most cell repair & restoration sleep recovery processes happen. Body temperatures changes also relate to a woman's monthly cycles & ovulations & it can track those things too, though as an XX man biologically I do not have a use case for such functionality, though I greatly appreciate the other improved features & functions. I like the dark black color too, the first non silver aluminum Apple Watch in our collection.
41mm Aluminum Series 8 GPS Specs
42.3 grams (41mm) Bluetooth 5.3 & WIFI B/G/N Dual Band, NFC, Navigation Tracking via GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, QZSS, and BDS. 1GB RAM, 32 GB Memory, Improve Accelerometer, New Gyro, 3rd Gen Heart Rate, Barometer, Altimeter, Compase, SpO2, VO2max, & body temperature. It also understands natural language commands & dictation using machine learning logic on the S8 system in a package (computer system on a chip) highly power optimized processor, graphics processor, ram, memory, sensor package, tiny, running on a tiny 308 mAh LiPO battery, with a sapphire ceramic back & mineral glass front display touch interface. Released September 16th 2022. WR to 50M ^^ swim & shower proof ^^ you can wash your hands or water the garden or walk in the rain without risk of damaging it, though they warn that water resistance reduces over time, especially from thermal cycling between cold & hot which accelerates the degradation of the adhesive polymer seals. Shame on apple for not using reusable silicon gaskets like a Rolex or Tudor & other high quality Swiss Made Automatic Watch // That would make changing the screen & battery, if you break the screen or the battery faded, less annoying & more repair friendly. I promote the ethics of Right to Repair laws because fixing electronics a lot more eco-friendly than e-waste recycling, especially since repairing electronics extends the functional useful life of these complicated to manufacture products made of highly mixed materials that are hard to separate because of how they are bonded & assembled, especially rare earth magnets, heavy metals like tungsten, gold, aluminum, copper, the chipsets, cables, wires, mainboard logic materials made of ceramics & metals like tin bonded tightly.
I suggest cooling the Apple Watch lightly while its charging, otherwise it they heat up while charging. I found a small ceramic dish that works & fill it with cold water & carefully place it on the top of the Apple Watch, while its charging on the counter or table. It looks like an odd sandwich, the charger puck, Apple Watch & cooling dish on top. Meg has her Apple Watch Series 5 charger mounted in an aluminum holder that keeps the inductive puck end cool by sucking heat away from it due to aluminums thermal conductivity & specific heat absorption that makes it useful as a heatsink material for keeping chipsets cool in brushless PC fan cooled finned aluminum heatsinks, in radiators & in other thermal cooling solution applications, aluminum water cooling block in liquid PC cooling systems, though aluminum not as good as copper at moving heat, aluminum is a lot cheaper than copper. Speaking of keeping things cool, here are the facts.
LiPO batteries like the ones used in Apple watches & other wearables are damaged by the following
~ Heat above 70 F / 21 C, they lose capacity faster at higher temperatures (heat capacity fade or loss)
~ Regular charging above 80% state of charge. Its really the top 10% above 90% causing capacity loss
~ Deep discharging bellow 5% state of charge. Never charge while frozen cold either!
Keep your portable electronics cool, partially charged & away from temperature extremes, especially if they contain lithium ion polymer batteries which are damaged by fully charging, deep discharging, high heat or charging while frozen.
Another way of saying this, you can make your portable electronics batteries last 5X longer by keeping them between 30-80% charged, never frozen, never hot, short charge cycles during coffee in the morning, while you shower, during a break, while you eat lunch or dinner, while you are watching YouTube or movies on Amazon Prime, you can set a voice time "Hey Siri" or "Hey Alexa" or "Ok Google" if you have those around the house. Think 10-40 minute charging, never all night long.
Speaking of waiting for a little while, I had to wait almost twenty minutes at the local Apple store to get someone to help me. Thankfully someone checked me in right after I arrived, otherwise I would have had to wait even longer. It was very busy with people middle Saturday morning at Bell Square Mall, Bellevue Wa, 98004. While waiting I spoke with other patrons about the Apple watches, the technology & differences between the models, since I had used the stores display case mounted iPad to research the items, their aspects, specifications, features, functions & differences, between three available models, SE, 8 & Ultra respectively.
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