For years, Apple has tried to extend the battery life of the Apple Watch. For as many years, the company has only succeeded by half measures. Features like Low Power mode or faster charging help you keep the watch on your wrist for longer, but Apple has not significantly improved the watch’s 18-hour battery life—even at last year’s much-hyped decade-versary of the Apple Watch.
I say this to give the context of why such a little thing was so shocking. After wearing the new Apple Watch Series 11 for a full afternoon and wearing it to sleep, I woke up in the morning and discovered that I still had 58 percent battery left. 58 percent! I can wear the watch to sleep, get up, get my kids to school, and charge the watch when I’m at my desk! Constantly fussing over battery life was a major pain of the Apple Watch, and it’s been fixed.
Longer battery life also makes it significantly easier to use Apple’s newest health features as well. If you have a Series 3 or 4 and have been waiting to upgrade, this is the year to do it. Too bad Apple couldn’t pull this off last year.
In a Heartbeat
Photograph: Adrienne So
First things first: The new Series 11 comes in 42- and 46-millimeter case sizes with aluminum and titanium finishes in a variety of colors—Gold, Natural, and Slate for titanium, Rose Gold, Silver, Space Gray, and Jet Black for aluminum). It has the same slim case as last year’s Series 10, along with features like fast charging and a new, more scratch-resistant glass.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has long contended that the Apple Watch is meant to save your life. In accordance with this, the newest features on the watch (or more accurately, the watchOS 26 update that applies to all Apple Watches, Series 6 or later) are health-related. First, the watch now offers hypertension, or high blood pressure, notifications.
Undiagnosed high blood pressure now affects as many as one in three people worldwide and can lead to heart attacks, stroke, or other long-term health conditions. The optical heart rate monitor on the watch purports to check how your blood vessels respond to your heartbeats; Apple says that the feature was developed with data from a series of studies that totaled over 100,000 participants.
To get the notifications, you toggle them on in the Health app. Although the feature received FDA clearance as I was writing this review (and you can see the clinical validation here), the app explicitly warns you that this is not a medical device. You have to be over 22 and without a previous diagnosis of hypertension, and it should not be used to diagnose, monitor, or treat pregnancy conditions like eclampsia.
Photograph: Adrienne So
But if you’re mildly worried that you might have high blood pressure (which, apparently, we should all be), the app will ping you if it sees trouble signs so that you can double-check with your doctor and a separate blood pressure monitor (BPM). It requires 14 days of monitoring before you can get a hypertension notification, so I haven’t gotten one yet (and hopefully never will). If you get a notification, you can also log your BPM measurements in the app.
The Whoop MG was the first fitness tracker I tested that monitored high blood pressure, but you do have to calibrate it with a BPM before you can use it. It seems like this will quickly become a basic feature on many smartwatches. Apple’s other new health feature, Sleep Score, already is—it checks the duration of your sleep, your bedtime, and the number of interruptions to check if your sleep was restful or not. In my week’s worth of testing, Apple gives me almost perfect sleep scores, even on a night camping when our tent almost flooded, and another smart ring noted that my sleep was “agitated.”
However, bedtime and duration are the only two factors we have real control over when tracking sleep, so maybe keeping the variables limited to what is actionable will prevent users from getting stressed. (You can also see your heart rate and respiratory rate in the Health app under the Sleep Score tab.)
Finally, and this bears repeating, blood oxygen sensing is back on the watch and apparently for good. The prolonged legal battle over a feature that is by now standard on almost every other watch appears to be mostly over, so one of the biggest dings against the Apple Watch is gone.
Mr. Worldwide
The watch also has a few upgrades to make it easier to use without your phone. The cellular connectivity model has now been upgraded from LTE to 5G, plus there’s satellite messaging, Find My via satellite, and Emergency SOS via satellite on the new Watch Ultra 3. To prevent reviewers from overrunning emergency services this weekend with false alarms (because we usually do call, just to check if it actually works), Apple conducted testing with reviewers on campus.
I also went camping off-grid this weekend to test 5G and satellite messaging, and I’m happy to report that it worked! (I added the watch to my own cell plan to test for this review.) One feature that I like is that, unlike other, more rugged satellite messengers, the watch guides you toward satellites for better reception. Satellites do require a line of sight, so this feature might not work well under tree cover.
If you had cell coverage with your watch before, you might not notice the upgrade to 5G. I am not watching videos or playing Bloons on the watch, but my music did download slightly faster while running.
Speaking of running, Workout Buddy was one of the most hyped-up features in watchOS 26. (You must also have a phone that is capable of Apple Intelligence.) To toggle on Workout Buddy, go to the Fitness app on your phone, go to a specific workout, click the dialog box, and toggle on the specific voice that you want to give you your encouragement.
Photograph: Adrienne So
As of publication, the AI-enabled personalized encouragement needs a bit more data to be useful. Right now, it cheerfully chirps my current stats with a disturbing amount of vocal fry, so I can’t really say that an AI workout buddy is preferable to a real-life one. I prefer walking, climbing, biking, or running with my real-life dog, friends, or kids as of now.
As for Liquid Glass, one of Apple’s most polarizing new features, you just don’t see it on the watch very much. Probably the most prominent places you can see it are in the new Flow face, which is just clear numerals with glowing blobs swirling around behind. I don’t object to how it looks, but as with last year’s Reflections face, I like to be able to see my notifications, steps, and battery life with my watch, so I don’t use it very much. The new Waypoint or even Exactograph is much more useful.
The wrist flick to dismiss the Smart Stack is nice; if you’ve gotten used to using Double Tap or shaking your head to dismiss Siri with your AirPods, you will find this familiar.
Family Watch
Photograph: Adrienne So
I generally say that if the latest watchOS is available on your watch, you probably don’t need to upgrade. WatchOS 26 is available on all watches Series 6 or later; however, this is the first year I’d say that it’s worth getting a new watch, especially if you’ve been waiting to buy one for a kid or elderly relative.
I had the opportunity to test the new Apple Watch SE ($249) and Apple Watch Ultra 3 ($799) as part of this review. The Watch SE hasn’t been updated since 2022, and that second-gen model just didn’t have many of the latest health features that are by now standard on every fitness tracker. The new Watch SE 3 has the latest chip and many of the health features that the older Watch SE did not have, like wrist temperature sensing and sleep apnea detection. Although it does not have the full 24 hours of battery life the Series 11 boasts, I still managed to eke out a day on one charge somehow. And it still costs only $249.
The new Watch Ultra 3 claims a full 42 hours on full power, up from 36 hours on the Watch Ultra 2. That means you can wear it for a weekend of navigation, satellite messaging, and activity tracking, which you definitely could not before. I tested this out this weekend on a camping trip with trail running, navigating for a several-hour-long drive, and satellite messaging, and it lasted from Friday morning to Sunday morning. It really is a weekend watch now, fulfilling the promise the original Watch Ultra made several years ago.
24-hour battery life is huge. Many users, including my own spouse, did not wear the Apple Watch to sleep, just because it was too annoying to wake up with a drained watch. Being able to wear the watch for 24 hours, instead of skipping one-third of each day, is a sea change.
Even if I find 5G to be personally negligible, satellite messaging dramatically adds to the usefulness of the watch. There are many times that I walk off without my iPhone, especially while camping, hiking, or running. The standard use case I give is leaving a campsite to pee—you think you’ve walked just a few yards to get behind a tree, and when you look up, you’re totally disoriented. Even without the watchOS 26 updates, these two features alone are worth upgrading for. It’s a good year for the Apple Watch—dare I say, the year that last year should’ve been.
