The Apple Watch Series 11 is here, with Apple having announced the new watch during its “Awe-Dropping” event today. The company added a little bit of new this time around, including a crucial update to battery life: the company says this watch can go for 24 hours on a charge. It’s available starting at $399 on September 19th, but you can preorder it now.
That’s not the most battery life you can get out of a standard smart watch, but it’s good for the mainline Apple Watch, which the company has never claimed would get more than 18 hours. (You can definitely get more if you turn a lot of your Apple Watch’s features off, though.) Physically, it’ll look similar to last year’s model, with Series 11 available in 46mm and 42mm sizes, with Ion-X glass for the 2,000-nit display that the company says is two times more scratch-resistant than before. The watch comes in both GPS and GPS plus Cellular versions, the latter of which uses 5G for the first time. It comes in Rose Gold, Silver, Space Gray, and Jet Black colorways or, if you get the Titanium case, Gold, Natural, and Slate (no fun colors, as usual – the Apple Watch is a Serious Device).
The Series 11 debuts a new ability this year: blood pressure notifications. The watch can notify you if it detects patterns that are consistent with a hypertension diagnosis. The company says this feature is powered by “advanced machine learning methods,” which analyze “how your blood vessels respond to beats of the heart over 30-day periods.” You won’t need a Series 11 to get those notifications – Apple says that’ll work all the way back to the Apple Watch Series 9. The Series 11 is preloaded with WatchOS 26, which has new smartwatch health features like a built-in sleep score that lets you gamify your sleeping habits.
Apple also rolled out two new watch faces. One is called Flow, which uses glassy, thick numbers against a colorful background to show off the Liquid Glass visual redesign that’s coming to all of Apple’s products this year. The other is Exactograph, which looks like a regulator clock, with concentric circles that separate the hours, minutes, and seconds.
The company also added a new wrist flick gesture that lets you dismiss notifications, stop timers, or silence alarms just by quickly rotating your wrist. The company had rolled out a tapping gesture for the Series 9 that lets you tap your forefinger and thumb together as a one-handed confirmation; that adds a bit of a battery life penalty in my experience, but whether the wrist flick gesture does too remains to be seen.
Also today, Apple announced the Apple Watch Ultra 3, which starts at $799. Like the Series 11, this smartwatch mostly looks the same as before, except that it has a slightly larger display (albeit with the same official given measurements of 49mm by 44mm as before), thanks to 24-percent thinner bezels. Its always-on display takes advantage of the Ultra 3’s new LTPO3 OLED tech, refreshing once a second – instead of once a minute like the Ultra 2 – with no battery penalty. In fact, the company claims this watch will get up to 42 hours of normal use, which for Apple means “training, racing, or going about their day.” That’s a bump from the 36 hours for the Watch Ultra 2. And if you’re doing continuous outdoor training, it’ll work for up to 20 hours in Low Power Mode with “full GPS and heart rate readings.” The Ultra 3 doesn’t get a boost in regular Low Power Mode, which still gets you up to 72 hours of battery life.
The new watch is thinner than the Ultra 2, measuring 12mm thick versus 14.4mm thick. Like the Watch Series 11, the Ultra 3 cellular version gets 5G connectivity, and the company says it algorithmically engages both of its antenna systems as-needed, for better connectivity. It also gets Emergency SOS via satellite, a feature the company first added to the iPhone 14 series.
Finally, Apple announced the Apple Watch SE 3 in 44mm and 40mm sizes and starting at $249; and it’s getting some of the biggest leaps in functionality of all of the company’s new smartwatches. The SE 3 now has wrist temperature sensing, sleep apnea notifications, and ovulation estimates, along with new features like sleep scores and the company’s AI-powered Workout Buddy that talks to you while you’re exercising (in a voice that, at least during the presentation, sounded eerily like actor and great-voice-haver Matt Berry).
The SE 3 also gets an always-on-display, fast-charging, and 5G cellular. Inside, it’s got the same S10 chip that’s featured in the Series 11 (and the Series 10, for that matter). It’s almost easier to talk about what it doesn’t have versus the Series 11. It uses the company’s older second-gen optical heart sensor, lacks an ECG sensor, and has no depth gauge or water temperature sensor, for example. It also won’t tell you if you’re showing signs of hypertension, and its 1,000-nit OLED screen isn’t quite as bright as that of the Series. It also still only gets 18 hours of battery life. Still, it’s a huge bump over the SE 2, and makes the watch a far more viable alternative compared to its higher-priced siblings than it ever has been before.
Like the Series 11, both the Watch Ultra 3 and the SE 3 are available on September 19th, with preorders available now.
Wes is a freelance writer (Freelance Wes, they call him) who has covered technology, gaming, and entertainment steadily since 2020 at Gizmodo, Tom’s Hardware, Hardcore Gamer, and most recently, The Verge. Inside of him there are two wolves: one that thinks it wouldn’t be so bad to start collecting game consoles again, and the other who also thinks this, but more strongly.
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