The Apple Watch Series 10 Is Still the Best Smartwatch for the iPhone

On its 10th birthday, the Apple Watch faces some serious challenges. While it’s still one of the world’s most popular smartwatches and fitness trackers, the wearables market has become flooded with dupes and wannabes. Additionally, there are few good reasons to upgrade to a new Apple Watch, especially since a hand-me-down Series 6 is compatible with the latest updates to watchOS and looks basically the same as a brand-new model. An older Series 6 also has blood oxygen sensing, a now standard health feature that the newest Apple Watches do not have due to a patent dispute with the health-tech company Masimo Corp. Finally, and most devastatingly, the Apple Watch also faces serious competition from the Google Pixel Watch 3.
After a decade spent defining a new market, the Apple Watch is just not the only good-looking smartwatch—or the only smartwatch worth owning—around anymore.
Charged with making this year’s Apple Watch irresistible, the company made a bunch of upgrades. The Series 10 now comes in a polished jet black finish that is indeed very shiny. The watch’s case is also much thinner and lighter, with a new S10 chip that is single-sided to be flatter, and a brighter, bigger, wide-angle display. The Series 10 now tracks your breathing disturbances while you sleep and can tell you if you might have sleep apnea. It charges faster, has a new speaker, a new depth gauge, and a new water temperature sensor. And watchOS 11 is still the best watch OS. It just is.
The Watch Series 10 might not deserve breathless adulation, and I’m pretty sure Beyoncé isn’t going to release pap photos of herself wearing it (unless she does, in which case, my bad), but this is still just the best smartwatch for iPhone users. The absence of blood oxygen sensing is a significant obstacle, but at the end of the day, it’s still the watch that’s the hardest for me to take off.
The most unbelievable thing about the Series 10 is that the display on the 46-millimeter model is actually bigger than the display on the 49-mm Watch Ultra 2. This trickery is accomplished through the miracle of geometry. The watch case has curved edges and the display extends down the sides, while the Watch Ultra 2 has a flat display and a titanium case that protects the corners from bumps and bangs.
It’s also much thinner and lighter than previous watches, and it’s especially noticeable when compared to the 45-mm Google Pixel Watch 3; Google’s watch is 14.3 mm deep while the Series 10 is just 9.7 mm deep. I personally don’t have problems wearing big, chunky sports watches—the bigger the better, I always say—but I do know people, including my own husband, who can’t sleep while wearing one because they’re too big.
The back is also now metal, both to incorporate some hardware changes and to improve the hand feel, although I don’t actually see or feel that much of a difference when I compare it to the previous Apple Watch’s ceramic back. I do love the polished aluminum jet black finish, even though it shows my greasy fingertips like whoa.
The curved edges do echo the Pixel Watch 3’s design, but the screens perform differently. I compared the two watch screens and the Series 10’s does have a wider viewing angle; the Pixel Watch 3’s display becomes unreadable much more quickly than the Series 10’s when you twist the watch away from you. I have a hard time finding this change to be that useful—I am a very active working mom of two kids and two dogs, yet somehow even I don’t find flicking my wrist towards my face to be that difficult.
What that wider viewing angle does do, however, is show off the new watch faces, Reflections and Flux, to many more people. All in all, these hardware improvements are focused on making the watch look more appealing. When even your doctor is asking you about your new watch when she’s supposed to be giving you test results (this really did happen), I think it’s working.
Two other significant improvements are faster charging and a better speaker in the watch. I am now going to drop my major tip, which is that if you have a fast-charging Apple Watch and a fast charger plugged into the socket in your bathroom, you can fully charge your watch every morning in the time it takes you to shower, brush your teeth, and dress, which is about 20 minutes for me. (You still can’t make the battery last through a three-day backpacking trip, however.) Apple also now claims that you can get every watch in a carbon-neutral combination, although we have historically been skeptical of those claims.
It’s really bad news that there is no blood oxygen sensing on the Series 10, and no word on when or if it will come back. This is ridiculous, as every single other fitness tracker on God’s green earth now has this feature. I may have never personally used this information, but we all bought pulse oximeters during the Covid-19 pandemic, and assuming I do get Covid again (once in five years, baby!), I imagine I will want to know what my oxygen saturation levels are.
The sleep apnea tracking feature, on the other hand, received FDA clearance during the testing period of this watch and rolled out yesterday with watchOS 11. It uses data from the watch’s accelerometer to check for breathing disturbances during sleep, and it’s only available with the Watch Series 9, the Watch Series 10, and the Watch Ultra 2. I was told by Apple that my review unit would receive an over-the-air update over the weekend, but it did not, so I only got a brief glimpse of the feature before writing this review. However, your sleep data only gets analyzed every 30 calendar days, so I wouldn’t have gotten any results back anyway. (Also, I don’t think I have sleep apnea.)
However, 80 percent of people who have sleep apnea are undiagnosed, and right now, the only way to get it tested for it is a disruptive sleep study where you go to a medical facility and get hooked up to expensive machines for part or all of the night. The fact that you now can check for sleep apnea, conveniently and at home, is pretty a big deal.
The new water features are intended for a very specific coastal demographic to which I am slightly ashamed to belong. A friend once told me that “the river is your church” and yes, it’s true. Most of my family’s recreational time is spent on, in, or around the water. I love the new water temperature sensor, which tells me if the water I’m swimming in is 81 degrees (just suck it up for a sec) or 72 degrees (hell no). You can see the Depth app underwater, which I tested via my usual method of trying to see if I can swim across the whole pool without coming up for breath.
My family spends most of the summer paddleboarding and paddle camping, and I just downloaded Paddle Logger for the Apple Watch. Similar to the cycling features, Paddle Logger uses GPS and motion sensors in the watch to guide you on a paddle journey with haptic and visual feedback. There’s also a new Tides app in watchOS 11, which is very helpful for figuring out when the water is going to be rising and when the winds will be picking up on the rivers near me. With all that said, I know that a lot of this country is landlocked. At least some new custom workouts for pool swimming have been added as well.
The metrics collected by the Watch Series 10 mostly align with my Oura ring. I will say that the Oura’s step count is consistently a few hundred steps higher that what the Apple Watch reports. The Apple Watch also tends to record around 10 to 20 minutes more sleep per night. But the differences aren’t big enough for me to think that the Series 10 is wildly inaccurate.
You’ll notice that I have not said that much about Apple Intelligence. Most of the machine intelligence in the watch is for things that you can’t really see, like suppressing background noise in calls or checking if your nighttime snoring is bad or really bad. I like it that way. As cute as Craig Federighi’s dog is, I don’t need a computer to generate images, write text messages, or make jokes. Humans are pretty good at all of those things. I don’t want to talk to my computer, either.
Not having blood oxygen sensing is a huge ding. But checking for undiagnosed sleep apnea is one of the most useful applications that I can see for a wearable that you’re supposed to wear all the time, and I’m not just saying this as someone whose spouse snores. Keeping a pocket-sized pulse oximeter at home is easy, but checking yourself in for a night’s sleep study is hard. In 30 days, I’m looking forward to seeing how many people realize that they do need medical intervention.
If it wasn’t quite as dazzling a change as I was expecting the 10th Apple Watch to be, it’s hard for me to say that it’s a bad update. The Apple Watch still has the best-looking display, the most seamless integration with the iPhone, the best accessories, and the best OS. I even caught my spouse, who is the least fashion-conscious person on the planet, looking longingly at the new all-black Watch Ultra 2. It’s still the best smartwatch and fitness tracker for the iPhone, and it still looks good doing what it does.