Learn how to turn off haptic vibration when rotating the Digital Crown button on your Apple Watch to disable tactile feedback when scrolling and extend battery life.
All Apple Watch models from the Apple Watch Series 4 (2018) onward incorporate a custom Apple-designed vibratory motor, dubbed Taptic Engine, to provide physical feedback on your wrist for various system actions. The Taptic Engine is capable of delivering a range of tactile sensations, including incremental clicks you feel on the wrist when scrolling through lists by rotating the physical Digital Crown button.
If you find this distracting, you can turn off haptics for the Digital Crown button in a few easy steps. Doing so may also extend your battery life by a few minutes.
Turn off Digital Crown vibration on your Apple Watch
Open the Settings app on your Apple Watch and select Sounds & Haptics, then scroll down and toggle off Crown Haptics. You will no longer feel incremental clicks when scrolling through settings, Smart Stack, messages, notifications, and everything else by rotating the device’s Digital Crown button.
You can turn off all System Haptics on this screen, if you want, or choose a more prominent haptics style for even stronger nudges on your wrist. To turn off Digital Crown haptics in the companion Watch app on your paired iPhone, select the My Watch tab, choose Sounds & Haptics, and switch off the Crown Haptics button. To re-enable the feature, follow the steps above but turn this switch on instead.
Taptic Engine in Apple devices
The Apple Watch isn’t the only device with a Taptic Engine. Apple first used the component for its pressure-sensitive Force Touch trackpad in the MacBook with Retina display, released in April 2015. A few months later, the Taptic Engine expanded to the Apple Watch and the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus.
It has since been used in all subsequent iPhone models. If you don’t like Taptic Engine haptic feedback on your iPhone, you can easily disable all vibration.