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.