The Apple Watch Series 12 and the Ultra 4 change everything: this is how they stack up against the current generation

Apple has just taken a huge leap with the unveiling of the Apple Watch Series 12 and the Apple Watch Ultra 4. After more than one version focused on refining battery life and performance, the new models bring improvements in power, battery life, and features, and build on all of that to focus on health.

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Much more health information throughout the day

The new Health Sensing System now measures our heart rate every five seconds and increases our HRV sampling by up to 24 times. On top of that, there’s daytime vitals tracking, the new Readiness app, and a new VO2 Max test that gives us immediate results. 

We’re moving from logging our activity to truly understanding it, and building on what we’ve already seen in watchOS 26 and confirming the rumor about continuous heart-rate monitoring, our health data takes a step forward. And it does so, to a large extent, thanks to the power of the new chips in the Series 12 and the Ultra 4, which lets us analyze information more and more quickly, including what we ask Siri for.

Siri can now help us remember what we just heard

The S11 chip also adds Audio Intelligence. Here, Live Rewind lets us pull up a transcript of the last 15 seconds of a conversation with a double press of the Digital Crown, while Siri Recap can create titles, summaries, and key points from conversations so we can look at them later. 

The Apple Watch gives us genuinely useful contextual memory, always under our complete control, and adds automatic recognition of sounds and music through Shazam.

Battery life, battery life, and battery life, above all on the Ultra 4

Compared with the Ultra 3‘s 42 hours, the Ultra 4 reaches up to 50 hours of daily use, 84 in low power mode, and up to 45 hours while recording outdoor workouts. Meanwhile, the Series 12 maintains 24 hours of battery life and now reaches 10 hours of outdoor exercise. 

Compared to the Apple Watch Series 10 and then the Series 11, the evolution is huge. Apple turns the watch into a far more capable health platform, with more context, more battery life, and more intelligence that, thanks to the power of the new chips, we get right on our wrist.