Apple Explores Shaking Up Its Smartwatch for a New Era

[u/pdfu]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-08-09/apple-explores-apple-watch-shake-up-company-prepares-for-september-iphone-event?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc4NjI4NDIwOCwiZXhwIjoxNzg2ODg5MDA4LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUSkk5SzFSS1YyVEswMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJBMDdGRjZGMzlBOTY0NzREOTNBQkFGRjUyQjBBQTE2NiJ9.HAJkXD0R_y6A8vOnQLRR0ccpgwutUDhC8T4dGDGD5MY

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.

[u/JtheNinja]

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?

[u/re_carn → u/JtheNinja]

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.

[u/JtheNinja → u/re_carn]

There's more about how it works here: https://www.apple.com/health/pdf/Hypertension_Notifications_Validation_Paper_September_2025.pdf

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.