The Apple Watch has never been much of a bedroom player, it will track you moving and your fitness using its native trackers but never has it had a native tool for tracking your sleep. But that could soon be changing if rumours are to be believed, and soon your bed will have a new occupant in it, although not for a long time.
The theory of the apple watch, particularly the newest generation, Gen 5 joining you in the bedroom is an attractive one. Now you can finally have data to back up your complaints of “having a bad nights sleep” or to track just how much that whisky before bed helps or hinders your sleep. According to The Verge, Apple may soon be launching a native sleep-tracker following the same principles as the phones alarm clock app.
Currently, the phone alarm clock app lets you set a time to wake up and the phone will softly awaken you at an optimal time according to your sleep. It will also tell you when you need to go to bed to get your required hours of sleep, which really just sounds like living back at home with your parents. Love it or hate it, the bedtime schedule alarm could be coming to the watch and bringing with it sleep pattern tracking. The question remaining then is, when do you charge the watch if you’re using it at night?
Thanks to the watches unique ‘never turn off’ feature your watch requires almost nightly charging. The battery does last for an impressive 18 hours, but if you go to bed at say 10:00pm, early we know, then your watch will die midnight. So you bring your watch to bed with you for a couple of hours and then it just leaves you.
The argument could be made that you would charge your watch when you get up and start getting ready for work. Well, the people able to do that clearly are not the ones doing their early morning F45 class and needing the watch to track that workout. The fitness tracker on the watch is one of the best in the market, so you don’t want to lose that data to get some about sleep. Let’s be honest you’d rather track your fitness and boast about it than be able to talk about your sleep tracker, no good story ever started with “I had a great night’s sleep”.
Now every fitness tracker on the market, be it Apple, Garmin, Fitbit or even the latest one Whoop needs to be charged and most of them require you to take off the watch while you do it. But the other competitors in the market last for a few days, so you can charge it while sitting at your desk. So while a native sleep tracker may be coming to the Apple Watch it may not actually be very useable.
Apple has not yet commented on the issue and it could all just be a rumour, but let’s hope Apple has a charging solution if it does end up launching.