Apple Watch Series 11 ZDNET's key takeaways Apple's baseline smartwatch offers upgraded health features and additional battery life.
The smartwatch's only weakness is that it's trumped by the value of its younger sibling, the SE 3.
The Series 11 is available to preorder now and ships on Sept 19. View now at Apple
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People wear Apple Watches for all sorts of reasons. There are the health and sleep tracking functions, which Apple has heavily invested in over the past few years. There's the second-screen aspect - some jobs prohibit workers from using their phones on the clock. And then there are the phone-free perks of disconnecting, albeit with some safeguards for contacting friends, listening to music, or getting directions.
Apple rolled out three new Apple Watches at its September iPhone event this year (the Apple Watch Series 11, Apple Watch Ultra 3, and the Apple Watch SE 3), and I have been testing all three for the past week. Now I'm ready to share pros, cons, use cases, and buying advice for each one.
Also: AirPods review: Apple pulled off something I thought was impossible
In this review, I'm going to focus on the Apple Watch Series 11, which I used to track workouts at my Brooklyn gym, monitor my sleep, and receive Apple's brand-new Sleep Scores, and do a whole lot more. So, is this a smartwatch to buy or upgrade to? Let's get into it.
Some features stay the same from Series 10 to Series 11. The biggest is Apple's chipset. Normally, it updates its chips every year, but the Series 11 keeps the S10 processor, the same chip as 2024's Series 10. Apple says that in adding more battery life through an internal design change that replaced its jelly roll cells with a metal can design, it was able to keep the form factor of the watch the same and use 2024's chip to process the new device. This means that the build of the watch is identical to the Series 10.
The screen brightness also remains the same at 2,000 nits, despite its competition, the Pixel Watch 4 and Galaxy Watch 8, amping theirs up to 3,000 nits. You have to upgrade to the Apple Watch Ultra 3 to get a 3,000 nit screen in the Apple ecosystem.
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