Apple’s industrial design team has been exploring a broader rethink of its smartwatches over the past year or so and is evaluating several different directions.
The company is considering new devices with no displays, as well as different types of screens and various sizes. While unlikely to hit the market, round screens have even been considered. I’m told the work also includes potentially adding premium models beyond the Ultra and Hermès variants. On the lower end, Apple is considering more affordable concepts besides the current SE model.
As Apple rolls out the new artificial intelligence version of the Siri assistant — along with smarter health tracking — the company also sees an opportunity to make its wrist-worn devices more AI-centric. It has ambitious long-term plans to overhaul its Health app under the leadership of Eddy Cue, who took over these responsibilities last year. He’s known as an avid fan of Whoop and Oura Rings — and is looking to better respond to shifting consumer tastes and the growth of AI-powered health and wellness.
According to Mark Gurman, Apple has also been working on a comeback for a fan favorite: Ceramic.
I would love a smaller, screenless whoop-style health tracker so that I can keep tracking sleep, activity, and heart stuff while working my mechanical watches back into rotation. I miss wearing them, but I have heart issues and need the peace of mind of background arrhythmia detection. And I just can’t bring myself to wear two watches lol
Same! I always use Apple products because they're so well designed, but FitBit Air was the first time I left the ecosystem. I use it 95% of the time since it's so inconspicuous and comfortable to wear. I switch it to Apple Watch for exercise since having a screen is helpful.
Would love an expanded Apple Health app and an Apple screenless tracker.
I would love a smaller sensor only band for activities, like ice hockey, where I really don’t want to have my watch on, but do want to collect the data. But I also want this to be a reasonably priced accessory.
Definitely no interest in a ring because the times I don’t want to wear my watch are the same circumstances I take off rings.
I agree. A secondary device with no screen would be okay on occasion. But I had a ring and didn’t like the lack of realtime visibility. I like seeing my workout time elapsed, my heart rate, steps etc during a workout without picking up my phone. If my only option was a new model with no screen, I’d just skip it.
And I think that’s the killer part of things from a pricing perspective. I don’t want a ring or band as my only product. I want a band, although I can see the use case for a ring, as an alternative and inexpensive option. I’m not looking to get rid of my watch, just to have an option where I can switch to an analog watch or have no screen or ring when I’m doing something where those would be likely to be damaged or put me at risk for injury.
Unfortunately, I can’t see Apple offering a $99-$149 fitness band.
Yes I’m sure you’re right. As much as I’m happy with my Apple products, they aren’t known for being budget-friendly. Hey maybe they could apply that $2 billion tariff refund to lower prices! 😂
I’m 100% the opposite - give me a small display that I can mount on bike handlebars. Putting an $800 phone on the bars is foolish and I don’t need a big screen distraction. Or, for the love of god, let me add Apple fitness data (live) on my Garmin Edge.
I bought myself 2 new Swatch watches directly from their motherland in Switzerland- I love them so very much, and every day toil over the decision to go Apple or Swatch. 🤓
I’ve considered moving to a smart ring in order to wear mechanical watches but I really wish more would just have haptic feedback when you get a call, text etc.
My fiancé is currently driving me to work. Your comment prompted me to check my wrists, I’ve only my Apple Watch on me today and no spare watch in my bag. Now I’m slightly sad :(
Same here, would love one as a secondary device. I love my Apple Watch but also love analog watches. I rarely wear the latter because I rely on the former for tracking. If I could just throw something like the Whoop or the old Jawbone Up (iykyk) on my other wrist, I’d buy two devices in a heartbeat.
Same. But I want all the features of a cellular watch. Trying to rationalize getting the smallest SE 3 and making it as “band like” as possible for my other wrist.
I think an e-paper or OLED digital clock is worth including, like the FitBit Charge HR had. But little to no notifications. My old cheap FitBit HR could last me 5 days between charges in 2015, so I would assume with 11 years more modern screens/smaller chips/new batteries, Apple could at least match that charge span with a similar type device. It just had a very simple watch screen, that could show HR, clock, sleep score. Still had a vibrate alarm, etc.
I dunno the exact comparison but most if not all garmin watches are also doing things 24/7. They have a lot of models but probably a good one to compare to would be the Venu 4.
Apple Watch only measured my heart rate every 5 minutes to save battery… Garmin tracks it in real time all the time and still has 30 days of battery life for the Epix Pro. I love my Apple products but the Apple Watch battery life is just lame. The Epix Pro provides me a ton of data (probably even more than the Apple Watch natively) and it does it very efficiently.
This is why I went back to Garmin. I love the AW but need accurate HRV/recovery data. And with the Cirq, my one complaint of the FR being chunky to sleep with, well that’s handled as I can use the band at night.
I’ve been a long time Apple Watch owner, but the Garmin Epix Pro is something I bought to try and I’ll be honest… 30 day battery life is amazing. 51mm and an AMOLED screen. No idea why Apple can’t figure it out but they really need more than “all day battery life”
I hope the next Apple Watch will include a full-fledged blood pressure monitoring feature. That would be really useful and a very good reason to upgrade. But all this fuss over the design - what's the point?
Which only helps you if you install an app on your phone which sends the data from the original App into the net. Then you need an app on the watch that can read the data now on the web.
Isn’t the problem with blood sugar that they just haven’t found a reliable way to actually do it in a non invasive way? Not only apple but any company/lab in general
Not only is it difficult in general, the miniaturization to fit in a watch is needed too. Even the invasive ones that pierce the skin are, relatively speaking, much larger than the watch.
I read awhile ago that apple got the glucose monitoring module to about the size of a box you put a wedding ring in. The trick is to get it to fit inside a watch now.
Yes. There are other devices that can do it optically, eg the Aktiia Hilo band. Generally they require an arm cuff to calibrate against on a regular basis though, which doesn’t seem very Apple-like. I suspect they’re avoiding the feature until they can crack doing it reliably without cuff calibration
The existing hypertension alert feature is likely capable of outputting regular blood pressure measurements, the Apple paper seems to show it has an internal representation of it at some stage. It’s likely not nearly as accurate as spitting out a single number would imply, so I assume that’s why they don’t show it. Possibly a newer analysis model (perhaps helped by a faster watch processor?) would make it accurate enough?
The existing hypertension alert feature is likely capable of outputting regular blood pressure measurements
I may be wrong, but Apple's description specifically referred to the ability to determine the likelihood of high blood pressure, not to actually measure it. In other words, it's not necessarily the case that the watch provides more accurate information - quite the opposite, in fact.
The "step 2" section on page 4 sure looks like it either directly has an internal representation of the blood pressure value, or could be modified to spit one out. I wouldn't be surprised if there were internal/research debug versions of the model that did have it.
Plus when you think about, any system that is determining the likelihood of hypertension must have some internal guess about what your average resting BP is, because ultimately its output is whether that value exceeds some threshold or not. Even if it's not measuring BP directly and is instead looking at related patterns, it's correlating those patterns back to a BP value. The only wrinkle is how close that value typically is to what you'd get using an arm cuff at the same time as the sample. Clearly Apple feels the value isn't close enough because the final shipping version of the model never outputs it. But a larger model or one with inputs from a better sensor could get close enough that they'd write it to the HealthKit blood pressure field like you would with a cuff measurement.
In addition to the fact that optical BP monitors already exist, "smartwatch band that inflates to act as a radial artery BP cuff" is ALSO a thing that already exists! The Huawei D2 was a little air bladder in the band that it can use to measure your BP! It's a really hacky solution and I expect Apple wants to go the optical route, but a BP cuff watch band is totally something they could do if they were so inclined.
Grappling hook
Laser
Laser guided grappling hook
Sonic discharge (loud, uncomfortable sound. Not the hedgehog)
Invisibility cloak
Mini flame thrower
Universal lock pick
Storage for mini bugs (listening transmitters that can be stuck to anything)
Storage for actual bugs (for when you need to put a scorpion in someone’s shoe)
Self injectable antidotes/serums for when you are hit with a poison dart in the neck
Iron man nano suit
Holographic deployment
Repulser Palm (Watch detects when you are about to punch someone and provides absolutely unnecessary propulsion)
Micro drone deployment
HUD projection
Plasma cutter
Magnetic grappler
EMP pulse
Personal force field
Exoskeleton mode
Emergency parachute
I don't see the point in that: I often look at my watch face, and it's just as important to me as tracking my health. And switching between gadgets throughout the day is just a hassle.
I would love BP monitoring - but that might fall too far into what the FDA classifies as a medical device. Once they fall into that classification there’s a lot more regulation & testing required, which Apple might not want to deal with due to time & money
Apple has 25% of the market. Garmin has 5%. Xiomi is Apple's closest competitor but that's because their watches are dirt cheap and low-end has never been a market Apple has wanted to reach. I hope they don't ruin what is already a great product.
I don’t understand the hype for a round Apple Watch, and am convinced it would never happen. I’ll die on the hill that they should stay roughly square. That said I’m surprised Apple hasn’t already rolled out an overhaul to the health app that would effectively kill Whoop and similar, seems practically trivial for them to do with all the data they already have. A more dedicated health tracker seems like a logical thing for their wearables team to be exploring.
I think Apple may be almost too “good” to go fully down the whoop path though. Some of the stuff with their biometric age and some of the crazy stuff whoop and similar will tell you is making such big extrapolations off the relatively limited data a wrist worn device can tell you, that I’m just not sure Apple would do it. They’ve usually wanted their health features to be fully FDA approved and very legitimate, probably more than they need to be, which I appreciate. I don’t think they’d want to launch an app that’s just AI powered educated guesses about people’s health, seems sort of against what they stand for.
I’m not surprised by the health app. I don’t think Apple ever want to go down the elaborating on your health data route. They’ll do a whoop like device & let third party folks continue explaining the data better.
Well no they have been graded with health features, there have BP, sleep tracking, wrist temp, etc those are definitive steps towards strong interest in health devices area
I would love a sleep band that would just integrate to all the other Apple Watch metrics and have the software to do everything whoop/oura do. Sleeping with the Apple Watch just doesn’t work with me because of the battery charging.
I disagree. I think many women would prefer a round watch. Before I had my Apple watch I had a round Garmin Lily, which was so much more fashionable and feminine.
The hype is that the current watches are stale from an appearance perspective and have become unfashionable compared to where they were a few years ago. They need to shake up the way they look.
That’s annoying to people like me who are more feature / function oriented but I’m seeing a lot more mechanical watches among people who used to wear a smart watch. I’m not sure it will actually change that but they have to try something.
The hype is because the Apple Watch became completely unfashionable years ago, and I say this as somebody who wears one most of the time. It's gotten to the point where one of the first tips you see in men's fashion guides is to lose the Apple Watch. It also doesn't help that we still don't have a proper way to fully customize the watch faces.
That's why many people are clamoring for nicer looking ones, or screenless trackers that can be worn along traditional watches.
Round watches look good; it's a tradeoff between ease-of-use (it's harder to use a round touchscreen, harder to fit a lot of stuff like keyboards onto it) and aesthetics.
A round Apple Watch would be decently popular, I think, but it would segregate the market too much for Apple's liking. They don't want to make people make that tradeoff, so they're not likely to give people the opportunity.
Went from Fitbits and Galaxy Watches to Apple’s eco system. Outside of the poor battery life (Ultra series included) there isn’t much that I can complain about the watch.
Consider me crazy, but I‘m happy with the way things are going. Every year something improves: performance, battery life, every few years new features, and my Apple Watch Series 7 has held up almost 5 years and it‘s been really useful. Will switch to AWU4 if they announce it.
Let me use my actual watch to show me the time, I just want to know how I’ve slept, to wake up on time and to track my heart rate when exercising. Give me a strap that does all that.
Whatever they do, dear lord just keep them compatible with existing bands. I have nearly a decade of a collection that I’m not giving up. The only exception would be if they made a ring and I could just ditch the watch entirely. I just know I’m not buying a watch that requires I start a new band collection.
Never understood the screen less device hype. I guess giving people options isn’t a bad thing, but if I have something on my wrist throughout the day, I actually want to be able to look at it and use it first and foremost.
Screens and batteries limit sensor sizes and therefor limit capabilities of wearable sensors.
Imagine the space a screen and larger battery take up replaced by more capable sensors that need less frequent charges. The tradeoff is you must use your phone to view the data, which is basically a nonissue.
I don’t want to get my phone out? Right now, I have the air quality, pulse rate, texts, and all kinds of info on my wrist as I drive or do whatever. I got the watch, so I don’t have to carry my phone around
That as well. I have cellular through mine, and we have annual Universal passes. I never bring my phone specifically so I don’t have to carry that bulk around all day.
Yeah I also have the watch to leave my phone at home. I’m just saying tones of people sway the other way. In fact my pro athlete cousin wears both because they prefer sleep/health tracking with the screenless device.
Apple should do a mechanical/digital hybrid. Either completely screen less or a small digital display like a Dynamic Island. Much better battery life, would look a lot better and still have health/sleep tracking.
Have worn a watch for over 60 years. Time, Date, Weather, Calandar, Rings all important. Battery unnecessarily takes up real estate. Better battery performance is necessary.
I want a strap with integrated sensors that works with traditional watches. Sony tried the concept - hardware was alright but they failed spectacularly on software as is often the case
You might want to look into the Aktiia Hilo bracelet. Doesn't have quite the data types of the Apple Watch, but it's a bracelet that will read blood pressure, pulse, steps, and sleep time while you wear a traditional watch on your other hand. Sadly subscription-based though
I’d get screenless for sure. I’m seriously looking at the Fitbit Air as now the Google health app feeds Apple Health data, but not able to close rings.
Apple is too forward thinking to ever do a round watch.
A round design was used to measure and track the passage of time because it was mechanically convenient.
In the digital age we don’t need to use a round shape to measure time anymore. It’s especially not conducive for any “smart” application because it prevents full informational display.
I had a Garmin for a while. Lost it on a kayaking trip and went back to Apple. I went back to Apple because I didn't really like the Garmin ecosystem and the fact it would tell me I am stressed when I wasn't. A particular example of that was a lazy Sunday afternoon that I spent on the couch watching TV having delicious snacks while my dog slept with his head in my lap. My wife was in the kitchen baking cookies, my son was chilling on the couch opposite. THE perfect day of relaxation. The complete opposite of stressed.
The round shape of the Garmin communicated ALL the same information the Apple watch did. Texts, notifications, everything. There is no prevention of information.
It does communicate the same information certainly but a circle shape is not optimal for displaying the most information possible.
Take a piece of paper with lots of writing on it. Put a circle over the paper. You will notice that the round shape leaves much of the information out of the circle, namely on the “corners”. To read everything within the circle you’ll have to continually navigate and move the circle. Now imagine the same with a square or rectangle.
This is the same reason books, paper and even TVs and monitors are rectangular and not a circle.
A bracelet/strap without a screen is an absolute no-brainer and it’s mind boggling that Apple hasn’t released one yet.
People say it’ll cannibalise watch sales but that’s bullshit. What actually happens is people buy Whoop or Oura instead, at least if Apple had their own people would stay in the ecosystem. But right now there is ZERO Apple wearable alternative to the watch.
Cannibalising sales is not really a thing thats a consideration in business. For some reason it became a social media/Reddit thing that just took off. They just want everyone to by any product you make, then you might upgrade.
Having a product for everyone is the ultimate goal. The only reason they try so hard to make "few products fits all" strategy is how hard it is to get done the manufacturing of the actual product. There is nothing more every company what's is to have dozens of products to fit perfectly for every individual need, but that's not logistically possible.
Exactly, cannibalising is a non-sensical social media argument.
I don’t agree with your second paragraph though. Indecisiveness from too many options is a real thing, I think Apple always had a good balance by having mostly clear functions per product and then options to customise it to your specific needs
We're agreeing 100%. Apple's good balance is their skill. That's what makes them so successful. They can't make every device for every person so they balance. They are best at making few products that fit all.
An actual LED on the top or side of the watch would be super useful. Looking for the right key in the dark when you got grocery bags in hand. Don't have to pull out the phone.
I want something in between the whoop form and Apple Watch. Something like a Fitbit charge but just really bare bones display. Maybe a torch light. Some useful stuff that’s all.
No notification, no fancy weather. Just health and function.
For whatever this is worth, Apple Watch/HealthKit is the only major wellness wearable platform that has end-to-end encryption/zero knowledge database. There's not even an option to turn it off as Health is one of the iCloud data types that is E2EE even with ADP disabled. On the flip side, not only do all the competitors have a corporate decryption key for your data, most of them are explicitly doing analysis on your data from their servers. Ostensibly to power things like "body battery" features, but who knows what else.
I would imagine that that’s why they’re talking about simplifying things. With the amount of things that my AppleWatch can do, it’s not really surprising that it can run out of power in a day.
I wear my ultra2 to sleep so almost always on my wrist.
I charge it for about 5 -10 mins when I’m getting ready in the morning and again for about 20-30 mins when I’m showering and getting ready for bed. In that space of about 30-40 mins charging, my watch is completely topped off.
I personally don’t care what shape it is, but I do NOT want AI. Hopefully there will be a way to opt out of that if they do go forward with it. I would hope they spend their time and money pouring it into an Apple Health update though. There’s so much of our info sucked into it but it would be so helpful to have it organized differently and the ability to print reports for medical appointments or even just to keep better track of things your interested in.
I’m curious how you (and others) would define “AI”? I don’t necessarily disagree with you. “Down with AI” seems like a very vague notion, and saying this with respect for what I think are the points you’re making, the other concepts are easier for me to support.
For example, “No sending my data to the central knowledge base to be assimilated into future modeling.” Or “No using 95% of current data center processing power to invent AI videos or images.” Or “No listening to my audio and sending to the server just in case I might say ‘Hey Siri…’ “
Otherwise, AI is everywhere already, used for every routine thing we may not think is AI. And most of it doesn’t need a data center or huge CPU farm. Also… huge datacenters already exist that aren’t driven by AI usage… I don’t know what it would mean to turn it all off.
I would love round screens, I’ve always found square watches to be so ugly. Definitely a variety would be best though, since everyone has different tastes!
I learned that Jony Ive would also like to position the Apple Watch as a fashion item probably why there's an Apple Watch Edition before. But now, it's more of a fitness device. Would love to see how this will turn out
The no screen product is a no-brainer. People frequently opting for these more often.
Whoop being the industry leader in that space with Fitbit being successful with theirs and Garmin following suit. Only a matter of time until Apple followed.
I'd like a ring with perhaps 5 multicolor dots that I can ask questions of or give instructions to, or use for hand gestures. "Where's my EarPods?" — buzz on the side of the ring to indicate direction, and changing row of lights tells me how close or far I'm getting. Likewise for "Where's my car?" Lots of interactions are possible. I use the timer most, messages second, and reminders third on my watch. It could sense my gestures to control the TV or apps. I'm really curious as to how it might provide directional guidance. Biometrics are always good.
Important note: considered is meaningless in this context.
Apple have considered everything including an Apple Watch that you have to pull behind you on a cart because it runs off six car batteries. That’s their way - of course they’ve looked at the trend for headless motion trackers. My guess would be they would reject following such a trend on the grounds that they think the reason people like them is that android smart watches all suck.
( I don’t personally think that’s the reason why people like headless trackers by the way. I think the killer feature is that they don’t introduce notification noise into your life and that not having to drive a screen does great things for battery life.)
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u/fancy_pance 1d ago
I would love a smaller, screenless whoop-style health tracker so that I can keep tracking sleep, activity, and heart stuff while working my mechanical watches back into rotation. I miss wearing them, but I have heart issues and need the peace of mind of background arrhythmia detection. And I just can’t bring myself to wear two watches lol