GoKawiilApple is pushing to make it as easy to access its Apple Intelligence features on your wrist as it is on your phone, which extends to the fitness-focused Apple Watch Ultra 4 announced Wednesday at the company’s fall event. Alongside the new Apple Watch Series 12, the Ultra 4 gains an S11 chip that contains a quad-core Neural Engine, enabling Siri AI out of the box for the wearable.
Preorders begin today, Sept. 9. The first deliveries and availability at retail locations will land on Sept. 18. The Ultra 4 starts at $799, the same price as last year’s Ultra 3.
Design and battery
The overall look is unchanged from the Ultra 3’s design, measuring 14.4mm thick and 49mm diagonally and weighing 61.6 grams. It’s made of 3D-printed recycled titanium and comes in black or natural titanium.
While the Series 12 follows Apple’s established pattern of refreshing the flagship Apple Watch every year, the Ultra models have arrived on a slower cadence. The Ultra 3 last year finally got an updated processor after seeing just a color change the previous year, but that was still the S10 chip that originally shipped with the Series 10 in 2024.
Battery life is still a top priority for customers, and Apple promises over two days of battery life, or 18 hours with regular use. In extended mode, it will get 45 hours. When we tested the Ultra 3, it achieved around 47 hours of real-world use. We’ll see if those numbers hold up under real-world testing as soon as we’ve had some time to use them.
Like the Ultra 3 before it, the Ultra 4 communicates with your paired iPhone and also uses 5G cellular technology when the iPhone is out of range (provided you’ve set up a data line with your mobile provider). It can also connect via Apple’s satellite texting service when there’s a direct line of sight to the sky, for when you want to contact friends, send your location or even call 911 in an emergency.
Siri AI
As with most of Apple’s product announcements at the event, the Ultra 4 gains new Siri AI features in WatchOS 27, like taking personalized action on your data (getting data and context from your email, calendar and messages) and being able to store and return to earlier conversational queries.
A new Audio Intelligence set of features brings sound recognition to Apple Watch, which can help people with limited hearing to identify sounds such as a baby crying or a fire alarm. Live Rewind can generate a transcript of the last several seconds of conversation – Apple used the example of a waitress speeding through the day’s restaurant specials. And Siri Recap makes a transcript of recent conversations so you can catch details you may have missed. Apple says these features do not store recordings on the watch or in the cloud.
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