@gruber What do you think about the situation with Apple Watch battery repairs? My Apple Watch Series 7 is now at 87% health and starting to show deteriorating battery life. I looked into a battery replacement, and it's $99, which seems fair given the complexity of getting into the device. But then I found out two things: 1) They send you a refurb Apple Watch, not your original. 2) The refurb (because it's imported) has 02 saturation disabled.
This doesn't sit well with me. The part regarding a refurb is maybe my idiosyncrasies but I feel this is my watch that I've taken good care of, even if another happened to look identical it isn't the same piece of hardware I've owned for a couple of years now. I feel for $99 it's enough to actually do the work of tinkering with it to take the battery out and replace it rather than mass ship them all off to China for them to be refurbed en masse and to send me back a random one that sat on someone else's wrist for years—plus doing the repair on your own device avoids the 02 disablement issue.
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@swingerofbirch Are you sure though that the O2 sensor is disabled on refurb units that are swapped for repairs? I was under the impression that while the sensor is disabled for all newly-purchased watches, it's not true for repair swaps if the original had the sensor enabled. I'm going to check with Apple on this.
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@gruber According to Reddit forums, if you're under AppleCare and get a battery replacement, they leave the 02 sensor activated, and if you pay for an out of warranty battery replacement, it's deactivated. I am not sure the reason for that. It seems to be consistently reported that way by users who have had replacements.
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@swingerofbirch I suspect you're right. Will let you know if I get confirmation.
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@gruber I wonder if they have legal obligations under the original warranty and AppleCare to not reduce functionality and they brought enough refurbs stateside before the ban to handle repairs? And then outside of warranty/AppleCare it's more of a courtesy where they can set new terms that don't include not removing functionality. Would be my guess. A lot of work on their part if so to avoid paying a licensing fee. The way they've dragged this out, I have a feeling they're going to introduce their own new algorithm (maybe with watchOS 11?) rather than license, and I have concerns it might not be as good. Masimo is pretty much the gold standard in oximetry, and you might have to come up with something convoluted to work around whatever tech they've established. Anyhow, thanks for following up with Apple—neat that you're able to do that.
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