Last year’s Apple Watch update was going to be hard to top given that it brought us the Apple Watch Ultra for the first time. By comparison, this year’s updates were always going to exist in last year’s shadow. But there are some interesting updates to the line this year.
First, both the Apple Watch Series 9 and the Apple Watch Ultra 2 get the new S9 chip, which delivers three primary advances. First, there’s on-device Siri. On all previous Apple Watch models, every Siri request had to reach out and interface with Apple’s servers, even for items that don’t naturally require the internet to answer. With the S9 chip, these non-internet-required tasks can just be processed on your Watch itself, dramatically speeding up the time it takes for Siri to process your request. If you start a timer, there’s no real reason why Siri would need to reach out to the internet. Now it doesn’t have to. On my Apple Watch Ultra, I just asked Siri how many hours of sleep I got last night. It was painfully slow because my Watch had to connect with Apple’s servers in order to answer. If you use Siri at all on your Apple Watch, this will be a win.
Secondly, the S9 chip includes a more advanced Ultra Wideband chip for precision finding. So if you’re using your Apple Watch to find your iPhone 15, which also has the new UWB chip, it should be able to guide you to exactly where your lost iPhone is.
Finally, the S9 enables a new double-tap gesture for acknowledging incoming items like a phone call, play and pause music, or snooze an alarm. If a double-tap gesture is possible for a given action, a new icon will appear onscreen. I’m embarrassed to say how many times I’ve acknowledged something on my Apple Watch with my nose because my hands were full, so this will actually be a useful gesture. It also gets people ready for Apple Vision Pro because the double-tap gesture is used there in place of double-tapping a screen or double-clicking a mouse. There was a similar accessibility feature already present in watchOS, but it sounds like the S9 chip does a more precise job of recognizing the gesture than before.
Both Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 get brighter displays: 2,000 nits on the Series 9, and 3,000 on the Ultra 2. This will help make the Watches easier to read in bright sunlight. My first generation Ultra has a 2,000 nit display and it is quite easy to read in bright sunlight.
I hadn’t put a ton of thought into what Apple might call the second generation Apple Watch Ultra. Apple Watch Ultra Series 2? That, I guess, would have been a bit of a mouthful, so Apple Watch Ultra 2 it is.
Apart from the brighter display, and all of the same advantages of the new S9 chip that the Series 9 also got, there’s not a lot new with Apple Watch Ultra. There are a few software updates, like a new watch face, but that also applies to the original Ultra. And despite the rumors, there was no second color option. Still just the natural titanium finish.
Apple spent a lot of the Apple Watch part of the event focused on Apple’s progress toward its environmental impact goals. I think it’s laudable to be a good steward of the environment, but I can’t help but think they spent as much time on that as they did because there just wasn’t much new to report with Apple Watch this year. For some years to deliver big updates, other years have to offer smaller ones. As long as the product keeps getting better, that’s ok with me.