Report: No Cellular Connection in Next Apple Watch

If you were hoping for a way to untether your Apple Watch from your iPhone and use it as a standalone device—complete with cellular connectivity to whatever carrier you subscribe to—you might want to abandon these Dick Tracy-like dreams. According to the latest rumors, the next version of the Apple Watch (whatever that happens to be, and whenever it happens to come out) isn't going to come with this feature. And there's a very good reason for that: allegedly, a permanent cell connection drains the battery too much.

According to a recent report from Bloomberg, Apple was allegedly working on such a feature for a new iteration of the Apple Watch in the hope that it would allow owners to decouple their two devices. You'd be able to walk to the grocery store and still have an updated shopping list on your Apple Watch even if you left your iPhone in the car (or at home), for example. And while it's rumored that the new Apple Watches the company is likely to announce this fall will have some new hardware features—including more health monitoring and GPS-based location tracking—they won't feature a cellular connection.

The inherent problem with Apple's plan is that the chips that would allow an Apple Watch to use a cellular connection drain too much of the device's battery. And even if Apple wanted to go that route—which it likely does not, given existing concerns over smartwatch battery life—it wouldn't have been able to manufacture and ship new cellular-connecting Apple Watches until December at the earliest.

So, the decision seems to have been made that cell connectivity—and chips that use less of a power draw to get there—will have to go in another Apple Watch update. It's possible you might see this kind of feature in a third-generation device, and it would be fair to speculate that one of those might come out next year. Don't hold us, or Apple, to that prediction, however. You know how these things go.

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