The long-awaited refresh of Apple’s Watch lineup is here. On Wednesday, at its “Far Out” event, the company announced the Apple Watch Series 8, alongside the rugged Apple Watch Ultra and the second generation Apple Watch SE. During the presentation, Apple revealed that the new models will feature a dedicated “Low Power Mode” to extend battery life. What's more interesting is that this feature has already made its way to older Apple Watch models with the release candidate version of watchOS 9.

Apple unveiled watchOS 9 during the main keynote of WWDC 2022. After seven beta releases, the watchOS 9 RC is finally available to developers and testers since September 7. While this iteration of watchOS doesn’t support Apple Watch Series 3 anymore, the operating system brings the new Low Power Mode on the Watch Series 4 and later. When the Low Power Mode is enabled, the Watch Series 8 will be able to get up to 36 hours of battery life (60 hours for the Ultra variant) per charge. The stats might be slightly on the lower side for the older models, though.

Notably, the aforementioned battery saving feature in watchOS 9 is different from the Apple Watch's existing "Power Reserve Mode" that only displays the time when enabled. Low Power Mode, on the other hand, conserves the battery power by turning off a handful of power hungry sensors and features like the always-on display, heart health notifications, and more, while keeping things like activity tracking and fall detection switched on.

Thanks to the novel power conserving technique of watchOS 9, users will be able to seamlessly extend the battery life of the wearables without losing access to all the features of the device. Presumably it works very similarly to the Low Power Mode that’s already available on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.

The Low Power Mode can easily be toggled through the Control Center. For non-beta users, it will be available as part of watchOS 9's stable rollout. The update will be available for Apple Watch Series 4 and later on September 12.