Apple Watch Series 3 commercial promotes untethered Apple Music streaming

Apple on Friday pushed a new video to its official YouTube channel, highlighting Apple Music streaming on the go with the new LTE-enabled Apple Watch Series 3.

The commercial runs one minute and ten seconds long, give it a quick watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9k88sMyiJM

The video closes with the tagline “40 million songs on your wrist,” a play on the “a thousand songs in your pocket” slogan Apple heavily featured in iPod advertising.

It’s a pretty brilliantly done ad, I’ll give them that.

“Feel the liberating power of 40 million songs on your Apple Watch Series 3,” reads the video’s description. The problem with that becomes glaringly evident if you glance over the official tech specs for Series 3—the device provides just one hour of talk time over LTE cellular networks.

So, does that mean you’ll be barely able to listen to an album before the battery dies? Probably not. Unlike cellular calls where the device maintains LTE connection at all times (otherwise, the call gets dropped), Apple Music uses caching to optimize battery consumption.

I’d say watchOS uses cellular data sparingly, to cache a few streamed songs, but we’ll have to spend some hands-on time with the device to see just how efficiently it performs in real life.

Lastly, digging into Apple’s battery page information for Series 3 shows ten hours of audio playback if the device is connected to its paired iPhone.

Apple Watch Series 3 will be available from September 22, a week from today.