Internal Apple memo says fix for Apple Watch overheating and battery draining is "coming soon"

The update to watchOS 10.1 delivered the new double tap gesture to Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 users. Tapping the index finger on the thumb twice will answer a call, reply to a message, and take you to your Smart Stack widgets. The gesture can also be customized to play or pause streaming audio or to skip a track. Once you are at your Smart Stack, you can choose to have the double tap gesture move to the next widget or select and open the widget that is on top.

But watchOS 10.1 also brought something else to the Apple Watch models that were eligible to install the update: severe battery draining. If that wasn't enough, affected timepieces were also struggling with overheating. No surprise there as those two things, rapid battery draining and overheating, usually go hand-in-hand like Penn and Teller, Lennon and McCartney, and Abbott and Costello.

An internal memo that Apple shared with Apple Authorized Service Providers was obtained from multiple sources by MacRumors. The memo says that the battery draining and overheating issues impacting some Apple Watch models running watchOS 10.1 will be resolved by an update that is "coming soon." The memo doesn't mention what is causing the problem nor does it specify which Apple Watch models are running red hot while battery life melts away like pounds on an Ozempic user.

Complaint Central, better known as Reddit, hosts some posts made about the issue including this one from user "sherpa14k" which reads, "After the latest update 10.1 my series 6 battery is not charging over 50% and it drains the battery in about 15 minutes. Anyone with similar issues after updating ?" The answer is an emphatic "YES!" Check out these two comments from owners of the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Apple Watch Ultra 1, respectively.

The first post, from a Reddit subscriber named "Hatsushira," is rather shocking when you consider that Apple says that the Apple Watch Ultra 2 can get up to 36 hours of battery life and double that in Low Power Mode. The post says, "My colleague's Ultra 2 has absurd battery drain as well. The whole battery from 100% to 10% in 3 hours." An Apple Watch Ultra user with the username "TigerTami," wrote, "My Ultra 1 did the same thing yesterday! Today it's down 28 percent in 2 hours. Hope it's fixed soon."

Until the update to fix this bug is disseminated, Apple Support told another Reddit user with this problem that they should uninstall and re-install Weather, disable Location Services for Weather and disable Significant Locations. Another Apple Support rep told an Apple Watch series 7 and series 9 user whose batteries have been dying after three hours of use, to delete all third-party apps.

Removing all third-party apps did the trick for one Apple Watch Ultra 2 user who says that once these apps were uninstalled, the battery life on his Ultra 2 returned to normal. Whether you want to go through the process of removing all third-party apps with a bug fix on the way depends on whether you can wait for the software update to arrive while getting just three hours or so of usage every day.

October 25th was the release date of watchOS 10.1. It was made available to the Apple Watch Series 4 and later and requires that the user have the iPhone XS or later running iOS 17. Apple notes that the watchOS 10.2 developer beta has been released but the release notes do not mention any sort of fix for the overheating and the battery drain at this time.