One feature that has notably been missing from the Apple Watch since day one has been sleep tracking, something that its competitors like Fitbit and Huawei have always had. According to a new report from Bloomberg, that's set to finally change, with Apple prepping the feature for a future model that's likely to arrive in 2020.
An issue that Apple might have to tackle for sleep tracking is battery life. For a device that only last about 36 hours on a charge, the most sensible time to charge it might be while you're sleeping. This is also an issue with Google's Wear OS smartwatches, which also don't natively support sleep tracking.
In fact, newer Wear OS smartwatches have a new chipset architecture. Qualcomm's Snapdragon Wear 3100 uses something it calls big-little-tiny, scaling down big.LITTLE for wearables and offering smaller cores for tasks that don't require much power. If Apple emulated this technique in its custom chipsets, it would allow for the Apple Watch to do things like sleep tracking and even have an ambient display without sucking down battery life.
According to the report, there are already employees testing out the new sleep tracker at the Cupertino campus. Presumably, they also take it home with them, where they actually sleep.
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