The Apple Watch Just Turned 10. Here's How Far It's Come

Every year, Apple launches 1 standout wellness feature, from measuring VO2 Max connected the Series 3 to the ECG sensor connected the Series 4, each the mode to slumber apnea notifications connected the Series 10. “If you zoom retired mode into the future, and you look backmost and inquire what Apple’s biggest publication was, it volition beryllium successful the wellness area,” Cook said successful an interrogation with WIRED past year.

This is simply a bold happening to say, particularly fixed that the Series 10 and Watch Ultra 2 don’t adjacent person humor oxygen measuring, owed to a patent quality with the medtech institution Masimo. For a while, Apple has been doing probe into features that would alteration the Apple Watch for radical with chronic conditions, similar adding noninvasive humor glucose monitoring for diabetics, oregon adding humor unit measuring for radical with hypertension. Alas, contempt promising advances, these features person yet to materialize.

Apple’s latest project, an AI-assisted broad wellness service, is acold down different wellness manufacturers specified arsenic Oura, Whoop, oregon adjacent Garmin. Imagine, for example, being capable to instrumentality a representation of your repast with the Watch Ultra and uploading it to the (still rudimentary) Health app, the mode you already tin with the Meals diagnostic connected an Oura Ring 4. You person to ideate it for now, of course, due to the fact that the Apple Watch doesn't presently person a camera, and Apple’s Visual Intelligence is inactive constricted to the iPhone 16. But it seems wrong reach.

Still, the Watch’s wearability and seeming ubiquity does mean that it has a way grounds of redeeming peoples’ lives, whether that’s by notifying users of an irregular bosom bushed via the ECG diagnostic oregon calling the exigency services if it recognizes the idiosyncratic has fallen oregon been successful a superior crash. I besides person a idiosyncratic anecdote to report—before the humor oxygen diagnostic was removed, I had pneumonia. How did I know? My humor oxygen level, arsenic measured by the watch, was astatine 84 percent. I went to urgent attraction and got antibiotics, stat.

While Apple has not historically ever been first to marketplace with a caller wellness feature, it’s a accelerated follower, and the features astir ever work. “Apple owners are precise diligent erstwhile it comes to Apple,” Naranjo says. “They’ve travel to judge that Apple doesn’t unreserved to marketplace with thing that isn’t astir perfect.”

Why You Wear It

That constituent seems to carnivore retired with the research. In 2022, astir 80 percent of Apple iPhone owners besides owned an Apple Watch, and it accounted for 56 percent of smartwatch income successful the North American market. Most importantly, probe suggests astir radical who ain an Apple Watch are beauteous satisfied with their device.

As astir of them are apt Apple users already, it helps that the Watch—like each Apple devices—integrates seamlessly with Apple’s ecosystem. It’s intuitive, casual to use, and has an interface that is pleasing to experience—both for the archetypal time, and 10 years on. I inactive twirl and propulsion each time the tiny integer crown each day, and find it a large mode for navigating the device's smaller menus without obscuring substance with your fingers.