There are many reasons why you might want to unpair your Apple Watch. Maybe you bought a new watch and want to sell or trade it in. Or you might be giving an old model away to someone.
Whatever the reason, unpairing your Apple Watch isn’t too difficult. Apple itself has a dedicated page for unpairing your Apple Watch in just a few steps. But — and this is important — as the tech giant points out on its page, Unpairing your Apple Watch will delete it. This is actually a factory reset, so please be aware of that.
Here are the steps.
Step 1: Make sure your Apple Watch and iPhone are close
Self-explanatory, but make sure your phone and watch aren’t too far apart.
Step 2: Open the Apple Watch app on your iPhone
Again, this step is easy to understand.
Image source: Screenshot: iPhone
Step 3: Click the “My Watches” tab and select “All Watches”.
This will display all the watches you have paired with your phone.
Step 4: Select the “i” information button next to the watch you want to unpair.
This will bring up the next page where you need to unpair.
Credit: Apple
Step 5: Click the red “Unpair Apple Watch” button
Again, make sure this is what you want to do as this will factory reset your watch.
Credit: Apple
Step 6: Confirm the Apple Watch you want to unpair, then make your cellular decision
Apple will make sure you want to unpair a specific watch. You will choose to unpair. You’ll then be asked if you want to keep your cellular plan on your watch. If you keep the watch and plan to use it again, you can keep the plan. You can cancel the battery plan if you plan to trade it in or sell it.
Step 7: Enter your Apple ID password to complete unpairing.
If you forget your Apple ID password, you can easily reset it.
This is the easiest way to unpair your Apple Watch, and the entire process shouldn’t take more than five minutes. If you can’t find your iPhone to pair with your watch, you can factory reset your watch to get the job done. Apple has the exact steps, but in reality, you’ll navigate to settings on the watch and then reset.
However, it’s best to reset using your phone. When you unpair your watch on your iPhone, it creates a backup to save your content and settings. You can then use that backup to restore your new Apple Watch. Just like that you’ll be back to normal.