Apple Watch
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Apple Watch
The ultimate device for a healthy life.
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| Official Apple Watch site — Apple |
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The Apple Watch is Apple's smartwatch line, launched in April 2015 as the company's first new category after Steve Jobs. It found its identity not as the fashion object of its debut but as a health and fitness device — and became the best-selling watch in the world, outshipping the entire Swiss watch industry.
Every model runs watchOS on an S-series System in Package, paired to an iPhone. Its sensors — heart rate, ECG, blood oxygen, temperature, motion — have accumulated into something unprecedented for a consumer product: a regulated medical device on millions of wrists that has credibly saved lives through fall detection, crash detection, and cardiac alerts.
1 History✎
The original Watch (2015, S1) launched with fashion ambitions and eighteen apps' worth of confusion; the Series 2 (2016) pivoted to fitness with GPS and swim-proofing. The Series 3 (2017) added LTE and became the long-lived workhorse; the Series 4 (2018) delivered the modern redesign plus ECG and fall detection — the health turn that defined everything since. Always-on displays (Series 5), blood oxygen (Series 6), the budget SE (2020), and the rugged Ultra (2022) filled out the family; the Series 9 (2023) brought on-device Siri and Double Tap, and the Series 10 (2024) went thinnest-ever with sleep apnea detection.
The 2025 lineup — Series 11, Ultra 3, and SE 3 — added hypertension notifications and satellite messaging on the Ultra, all running the carried-over Apple S10 in a first chip-less year for the line. watchOS 26 brought the Liquid Glass design and Workout Buddy.
2 Current lineup✎
| Model | Chip | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Apple Watch Ultra 3 | S10 (2025) | Rugged flagship: largest display, satellite, longest battery |
| Apple Watch Series 11 | S10 (2025) | The mainstream Watch |
| Apple Watch SE 3 | S10 (2025) | Entry model |
3 Position✎
The Watch is the iPhone's most successful satellite: useless without one, indispensable beside one. Its health mission gives Apple its clearest public-good story — and its deepest regulatory entanglements, from ECG clearances to patent disputes over blood-oxygen sensing. The S-series silicon inside it also quietly powers the HomePod line.