Figured I’d cross-post my S5 battery anecdote here in the big thread.
42mm aluminum S5 LTE here.
I wake up at 6am, do a 60-90 minute workout every day (strength with phone or outdoor run with no phone). On runs, I Bluetooth music to Wireless Beats Pro from a playlist stored on my watch. Every day around 6/7/8pm, it's bugging me to go into power reserve. Once a week, in addition to my morning workout, I play beer league hockey at night and use the Hockey Tracker app. If I don't do my evening charge after I get home form work, it will die mid-game without a doubt. AOD is on (I find it ridiculous that I would have to turn off the core feature of the watch to reach advertised battery life), and my only 3rd party complication is Dark Sky. No noise/compass complications either.
It's extremely rare when I can last until 11pm when doing any sort of workout and I almost always have to do a 20-minute evening charge to make it the whole day. It's super disappointing compared to my old Series 3 LTE in which I'd go to bed regularly at 40% (20% on hockey nights). I never had to charge mid-day, even on it's 2-year old battery. My 5 is super disappointing when it comes to battery.
That said, I've done the chat support a handful of times, and have done the whole update software, un-pair/re-pair thing. 6.0 was even more garbage. 6.0.1 made some improvement, but still short of the usage stated on Apple's website (18 hours, with 4 of those on LTE, with one hour workout, etc). 6.1/6.1.1 no improvement over 6.0.1.
Finally, after my 3rd or 4th online chat, they had me set up an appointment to bring it in. The dude at the Apple store said that he's personally serviced a few people with the same issue with the 5. But of course, my battery (and theirs) all pass diagnostics with flying colors. He's having mine sent in for repair regardless, since it doesn't reach the advertised battery life, but he's also done this for other people, and the repair center just sends it right back when it passes diagnostics. He said one guy had to send his back 3 times before they just swapped it out with a new one, and he no longer had a battery issue.
Just got an update from the repair center earlier today and they shipped it back saying there’s nothing wrong with it and they couldn’t reproduce the issue. Sheesh.
Of course I’m outside the return window from Best Buy, so I can either complain to Apple some more or just deal with it. Sucks.