Goodbye Apple Watch Series 4: Why I Made the Switch

This week I finally said goodbye to my Apple Watch Series 4. I had it for more than 7 and a half years but now it was time to make a switch. The watch was running on an old OS and missing many of the newer sports activity features. It also has a limited 16Gb capacity which was never a big deal to me until Q4 2025 when the watch started to complain it was running out of memory. I have very few apps installed and no pictures or music on it but even so it was getting full. The other main issue was the degraded battery life after 7 years. The Apple Watch has never been known for excellent battery life but my old watch was really starting to run out of steam here. Last winter I tried to keep running and very often I would come close to having no battery left on an afternoon run in the cold after having fully charged the watch overnight. With recent warmer temperatures this was a bit better but still I would often get into situations where the watch would simply run out of battery. Last week it happened 2 times. First, during a long walk where I missed registration of the last hour of my walk. And then 2 days later during a 5k run around 5pm which I barely was able to fully registered. It fully registered this run but as I stepped into my home the watch died. Had I gone for my regular 7k run then it would again have died prematurely. When the watch started to complain again the next day about lack of storage space I finally had enough and decided it was time for a change. It served me well for more than 7 years and for tracking my runs I first used the Polar app and then switched to Strava to track my runs. Only in 2025 did I switch to the Apple Watch Workout app and ‘suffered’ from the old OS with limited features for running. That wasn’t enough of an incentive to get rid of it but the fact that I could no longer rely on it to completely register my activities certainly was. To my surprise I found out you can still get a refurbished Apple Watch Series 4 today on for example Bol.com. Technically I believe it is not too different from the SE and I think the main reason not to go for it would be the OS version you can run on it. Looking at the prices they are not a lot lower compared to what you would have to pay for a refurbished SE2 on the Apple site. Probably only interesting if you are looking for the lowest price and don’t care much about watch software features. Of course, most things still just work and if it hadn’t been for the poor battery life I would probably still have held off getting rid of it. For a smart watch 8 years sounds old but for a regular watch 8 years is nothing. For me it is the main reason not to spend too much money on it, the technology will become outdated long before the hardware gives up.