The Apple Watch upgrade cycle is more trick than treat

This time of year is quite hard work if you’re a journalist who writes about Apple products. (I know, I know. First-world problems.) First, there’s the September event, which means lots of urgent news in a big rush. Then you spend several weeks carefully testing the new devices and writing in-depth reviews. And then, just when you think the worst is over, you get hit in the face with a bunch of October launches, as is expected to happen this week.

Last week, I finished my review of the Apple Watch SE 3 and then, like the tireless journalistic Stakhanovite that I am, plowed straight on with the Apple Watch Series 11. I say this not to win your admiration, although I certainly deserve it. But to observe that using three different watches in the space of three weeks—Series 9, SE 3, and now Series 11—is a strange experience, and one that demonstrates how much Apple’s launch strategy depends on direct comparison.

By any reasonable metric, all three of those products are excellent smartwatches that won’t let you down. They all have always-on displays, a wide array of medical apps and sensors, and powerful componentry. My Series 9 was two years old when I stopped using it, which is unusual for a grotesquely privileged reviewer like me, but at no time did I feel it was outdated or slow or unequipped for the role assigned to it in my life. To the uninitiated, and frankly to the initiated too, they’re all basically as good as each other.

But when you put them next to each other, the little differences suddenly jump out. Switching from the Series 9 to the SE 3 made the latter’s screen seem painfully small, at least initially. (It didn’t help that I went from the larger Series 9 to the smaller SE 3.) I missed the ECG and blood oxygen sensor, despite almost never using them on the Series 9, and fretted, unnecessarily, that the lack of Precision Finding would make life more difficult. Subjective comparison highlighted the very minor flaws of an objectively strong product. And then the journey from SE 3 to Series 11 made the latter look much better than it would have coming from a Series 9 or 10.

The point is that, like the iPhone and the iPad, the Apple Watch has reached a point in its evolution where the chances are low that anything really significant is going to change in the space of one or two generations: all the low-hanging and nutritionally important fruit was plucked long ago. In fact, despite being younger than those other two, the Apple Watch has moved further down this path because it’s innately more limited as a product. It does fewer things, hence being good enough at all of them is easier to achieve.

The apps and functions I use and enjoy most on my Apple Watch are ones that have been there for years: Workout, Activity rings, sleep tracking, on-wrist message notifications, and the ability to make my iPhone beep when I can’t find it. With rare exceptions (the iPhone Air’s radical redesign is one, and we may get a similar revamp of the Apple Watch at some point), such products tend to reach a sort of evolutionary equilibrium where big-picture strategic change in any direction can only make them worse, and the logical way forward is barely noticeable iterative improvements to the underlying tech. Microwave ovens are like this, and nobody’s surprised when a new microwave comes out and it doesn’t change the entire microwave paradigm. Nor do we all get excited about buying a new microwave every three years.

But Apple, somehow, manages to sell the tiny upgrades like they’re going to make a dent in the universe. And its yearly updates to the iPhone and Apple Watch, which nine times out of 10 are minor and iterative, are major press events that merit a mention on the news and poor overworked journalists having to clear their schedules and work until really quite late at night.

This is not to say that upgrades are pointless, or that Apple should stop releasing new Apple Watches. (Nor is any of this directed at the Apple Watch SE 3 in particular, which is richly deserving of its 4.5-star review. The fact that the products have little to differentiate them means it’s more important than ever to look for value for money.) It’s just to observe that so much of the company’s upgrade strategy depends on technological envy: comparing the perfectly serviceable product in your pocket to the one in the shop that does a couple of things slightly better and dropping a fat wad of cash out of pure undiluted FOMO.

It’s my job as a reviewer to describe and evaluate the ways in which the Apple Watch has changed since last year; it’s a hard job, but someone has to do it. And it’s your job as a customer to appreciate that, as nice as the watches are, most of those changes don’t make anywhere near enough of a difference to justify paying for a new device.

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

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