The Apple Watch has been a grand success for the company, with the wearable raking in over 1 billion dollars in revenue for the brand. One of its most touted features during its marketing campaign was the accuracy of its timekeeping. The company has been mum so far on what exactly it does to make the smartwatch so precise.
A new interview with Apple’s VP of Technology Kevin Lynch finally outs some of the Apple Watch’s secrets. The wearable makes use of a crystal temperature-control oscillator to protect itself from the effect of extremely hot or cold environments, compensate for drift and showcase the correct time.
Lynch goes as far as to say the Watch is 4 times more accurate than the iPhone when it comes to telling the time. He told Mashable that Apple utilizes over 15 Stratum One-level Network Time Servers (NTP) across the globe to deliver the time to its products. These servers are housed within buildings with GPS antennas on its roof, which communicate with satellites.
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The satellites get their information from the U.S. Naval Observatory. An iPhone receives this data and sends it across to the Watch via Bluetooth. The time is further corrected to account for delays in communication. Lynch claims this system is so precise, anyone who positions 2 models side-by-side will observe that the second hands are perfectly in sync with each other.
Apple apparently tests the Watch’s preciseness by keeping it under the observation of high-speed cameras. It looks for any latency or irregularity on a frame-by-frame basis. It’s worth noting that there’s no way to actually verify these claims unless an outside source with access to an atomic clock and a bunch of watches decides to investigate them.