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The Apple Watch Is the Best Smartwatch for iPhone Owners

By Caitlin McGarry
Updated
The new Apple Watch lineup, two of the three resting on gray and white stones.
Photo: Michael Hession

If you have an iPhone and you want a smartwatch, buying an Apple Watch is a no-brainer, and for most people, the Apple Watch Series 9 is the best option available. But we also found plenty of reasons to like the budget-friendly Apple Watch SE and the sportier Apple Watch Ultra 2, which replaces last year’s Ultra but looks identical.

The Apple Watch Series 9 has the best combination of features and apps for the price—if you’re looking for a smartwatch for yourself, we think it’s the one to buy. But the 2nd-generation Apple Watch SE is a great first smartwatch (or gift for a family member), though it offers fewer features and lacks an always-on display. Our upgrade pick, the expensive, rugged, and huge Apple Watch Ultra 2, is designed for athletes but also ideal for anyone who wants a gigantic screen and lengthy battery life.

Everything we recommend

Our pick

With an always-on display, two sizes to choose from, and advanced health and fitness features, the Apple Watch Series 9 is great for buyers upgrading from an older Apple Watch.

Buying Options

Budget pick

The SE offers many of the same key features as the Series 9, minus an always-on display and certain health-tracking tools, for a much lower price.

Buying Options

$230 $190 from Amazon

You save $40 (17%)

Upgrade pick

In the Ultra 2, you get all the Series 9’s flagship features, plus a whole lot more, such as lengthy battery life and a rugged design—but it’ll cost you.

Buying Options

Our pick

With an always-on display, two sizes to choose from, and advanced health and fitness features, the Apple Watch Series 9 is great for buyers upgrading from an older Apple Watch.

Buying Options

The Apple Watch Series 9 offers the best combination of style, health and fitness features, app selection, battery life, and price of any smartwatch for any platform. Available in body sizes of 41 mm and 45 mm, it has more active screen area than the Apple Watch SE and watches released prior to the Series 7. The Series 9 also offers more premium features than previous models, including support for Apple’s Double Tap gesture, as well as two temperature sensors, car-crash detection, emergency SOS, an always-on display, blood-oxygen measurement, ECG, and fast charging. It’s available in aluminum or stainless steel.

Budget pick

The SE offers many of the same key features as the Series 9, minus an always-on display and certain health-tracking tools, for a much lower price.

Buying Options

$230 $190 from Amazon

You save $40 (17%)

The Apple Watch SE is slightly smaller than the Series 9, coming in 40 mm and 44 mm case sizes, which makes it a bit easier to wear for folks with small wrists. However, its slightly smaller screen wakes only when you tap it or raise your wrist, so it isn’t as useful for telling time. It also lacks the temperature sensors, ECG feature, and blood-oxygen measurements of more expensive Apple Watches. Otherwise, it does the same Apple Watch–y things, including notifications, heart-rate monitoring for health and fitness, and crash detection, and it costs at least 30% less depending on the configuration, making it an appealing choice for anyone on a tighter budget.

Upgrade pick

In the Ultra 2, you get all the Series 9’s flagship features, plus a whole lot more, such as lengthy battery life and a rugged design—but it’ll cost you.

Buying Options

The Apple Watch Ultra 2 is a rugged smartwatch designed to compete with dedicated diving watches and running watches from the likes of Garmin. The Ultra 2’s 49 mm case size gives it the biggest display of any Apple Watch, and with an increased display brightness of up to 3,000 nits (a unit measuring brightness), it’s also the easiest model to see in blazing sunlight. In addition to its larger size, the Ultra 2 has a few key design differences that separate it from other Apple Watches, including a flat-edged screen, a 30% larger Digital Crown, and a side Action button for quickly launching an app. All those features, combined with its lengthy battery life—more than double that of the Series 9—make the Ultra 2 an absolute beast. Due to its size and price tag, it’s overkill for many people, but for some, the features may be worth the upgrade.

Senior editor Caitlin McGarry has been writing about Apple for almost a decade, reviewing Apple devices in every category from Apple Watches to iPhones, iPads, MacBooks, iMacs, and more for Macworld, Tom’s Guide, and Gizmodo. She has tested and written about every Apple Watch model since the original debuted in 2015.

Smartwatches aren’t miniature smartphones, and their apps aren’t as full-featured as what you can find on a phone. But newer smartwatches are packed with sensors that enable them to do things your phone can’t, such as detecting serious heart conditions or tracking menstrual cycles more accurately.

An Apple Watch reduces the amount of time you spend staring at your phone, provides quick access to useful information, and lets you handle some tasks you’d otherwise need to pull out your iPhone to do. With an Apple Watch, you can easily view and respond to iMessages, use Apple Pay to buy things at many stores (or, in many places, pay for a train or bus ride), show your boarding pass at an airport, toggle smart lights, get directions, ping the iPhone you left under a pillow, and, of course, check the time.

If you’re considering an Apple Watch for a kid or for a family member without an iPhone, Apple offers a feature called Family Setup. It’s limited to Apple Watch models with cellular capability, which means you need to spend at least $330 on that Apple Watch if you’re buying new. For most people, Family Setup makes sense to use only with a hand-me-down Apple Watch. But it allows parents to limit apps and contacts, set a Schooltime mode for limited distractions, and check in on a child’s whereabouts.

Apple Watches with advanced health features such as fall detection, electrocardiograms, atrial-fibrillation detection, high- and low-heart-rate alerts, and blood-oxygen monitoring may be worth buying for those who are concerned about potential heart-health issues or for aging parents.

In addition to its sophisticated health features, the Apple Watch is an effective activity tracker—though if all you want or need is basic fitness tracking, you can find considerably less expensive devices for recording your running, cycling, steps, and heart rate. If you’re an athlete looking for a more advanced device with sophisticated GPS tracking and physical buttons, the Apple Watch Ultra 2 may be the watch for you.

Apple is making a big push toward making its product lineup “carbon neutral” by 2030, pledging to reduce its emissions and offset the rest by purchasing carbon credits. The Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 are the first devices to reach that goal (when paired with specific watch bands). Apple’s move to use more renewable energy to produce devices made of recycled metals seems to be a positive one, though you shouldn’t buy a new Apple Watch just because the company claims it is “carbon neutral.” The best thing you can do for the environment is buy nothing at all, and the next best thing is to use a device for as long as possible before replacing it.

The Apple Watch Series 9 with a pink wrist strap showing a geometric background.
Photo: Michael Hession

Our pick

With an always-on display, two sizes to choose from, and advanced health and fitness features, the Apple Watch Series 9 is great for buyers upgrading from an older Apple Watch.

Buying Options

The Apple Watch Series 9 is the best Apple Watch. It comes in two sizes, so it’s more versatile than the Apple Watch Ultra 2. It has more features than the Apple Watch SE, too, plus an always-on display, which the cheapest Apple Watch lacks. But it represents the most incremental of incremental updates after years of big new features, and if you have an older Apple Watch—namely the Series 6, 7, or 8—you might want to hold off on upgrading.

If you have a Series 4 or 5, the Series 9 will feel like a dramatic improvement. With fast performance, a bright screen, a feature that lets you find your lost iPhone with more precision, and support for a gesture control called Double Tap, the Apple Watch Series 9 is the best smartwatch for most people. It isn’t exciting, but it is worth buying—and Double Tap is convenient.

Two Apple Watch Series 9s, the aluminum with a pink wrist strap and the stainless steel with a beige strap.
The Series 9 comes in aluminum (left) and stainless steel (right). Photo: Michael Hession

It’s plenty powerful. With Apple’s latest S9 system-on-chip, the Series 9 is responsive and exhibits little to no lag, even when you’re asking Siri (everyone’s voice-activated nemesis) to handle tasks. Siri can now handle many requests on-device, removing the time it takes to send a query to the cloud. In our tests, commands for tasks such as sending a text, playing a song on Apple Music, delivering the weather forecast, or adding a reminder were processed instantaneously. Siri on the watch still has moments when it gets confused, especially if you have multiple Apple devices in your home, and the HomePod a room away, for example, answers you instead of the watch. Siri also sometimes responded with a random web result instead of an actual answer to a question in our tests, but I’ve come to accept that as one of the voice assistant’s many, many quirks. All that is to say that the Series 9 is fast.

It lets you track down your iPhone more precisely, but the feature is merely a novelty. Just as you can use an iPhone to track down an AirTag with guided directions, now you can use an Apple Watch to find an iPhone. This feature sounds more useful than it actually is, because you can already use an Apple Watch to ping a lost iPhone; in every scenario I’ve experienced, the resulting trill has been plenty loud enough for me to hunt down the device, and unlike with the Series 9, you don’t need an iPhone 15 for that function to work. (You can’t disable the noise on the iPhone and rely only on Precision Finding.)

Double Tap is useful. The Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 are the only two Apple Watches that support a new way to interact with the watch: a gesture control called Double Tap. The feature allows you to respond to notifications or control Apple’s built-in watch apps by tapping together the thumb and index finger of your watch hand two times. For instance, if you’re receiving a phone call, a double tap answers. If you’re listening to music, a double tap pauses the track. If you want to respond to a text message with an audio reply, a double tap records your voice and sends the response. In my testing of Double Tap, it worked well. It’s most useful when your hands are full or covered in the detritus of making dinner, for example, and prevents you from getting anything gross on your watch screen. I also tested it out while wearing gloves, and it worked just as well.

Video: Caitlin McGarry

Apple already supports gesture controls on the Apple Watch as part of its accessibility settings, and you can enable those on older watches. But Double Tap works a little differently: You can’t use it as the sole way of interacting with the watch, as you can with the accessibility gestures, and because the S9 chip is designed in part to detect double taps at all times, the feature would likely drain the battery life of older watches with less-efficient chips; as such, only the Series 9 and Ultra 2 support it.

The battery life remains unchanged. In our tests, a charge lasted around a day and a half. Apple has been promising 18-hour battery life since the first Apple Watch, and the same is true of the Series 9. It actually lasts longer in real-world use, closer to 36 hours, even when tracking workouts and sleep. I’m in the habit of charging the watch every morning while I have coffee and get ready for work, but if battery life is your top priority in a smartwatch, the Ultra 2 lasts far longer than the Series 9 (and also costs a lot more).

Charge after 30 minutesCharge after 60 minutes
Apple Watch SE (2nd gen)33%66%
Apple Watch Series 961%97%
Apple Watch Series 851%97%
Apple Watch Ultra38%71%
Apple Watch Ultra 244%75%

The Series 9’s design also remains unchanged, for better or worse. The Apple Watch Series 9 is a slightly rounded square, just like the Series 8, the Series 7, Series 6, and, well, you get the idea. Also like its predecessors, the Series 9 comes in two case sizes, 41 mm and 45 mm, and the smaller model is better suited for smaller wrists than the larger one is. It comes in five shades of aluminum, including a new pink hue that is far less offensive than the rose gold of Apple Watches past, and four shades of stainless steel. Though the Series 9’s display is the same size as the Series 8’s, it’s a bit brighter, capable of going up to 2,000 nits instead of 1,200 nits; as a result, the screen is easier to read in bright sunlight. It also dims considerably darker than those of other Apple Watches when you put the Series 9 in Sleep Focus.

It has all the health, fitness, and emergency safety features you could want. Like the Series 8, the Series 9 has two temperature sensors for more granular menstrual tracking, a blood-oxygen sensor, and electrocardiogram (ECG) hardware for detecting irregular heart rhythms. It can detect falls and car crashes, too, and an emergency SOS feature allows you to call for help if you’re in a crisis. It isn’t quite as advanced in fitness tracking as the Ultra 2—you can’t use it as a diving computer, for instance—but it also costs a lot less than that model.

Few people need cellular. For $100 extra up front plus an additional monthly fee for a data plan, you can use your watch completely independently of your phone. But in tests, we’ve found cellular connectivity to be rarely necessary and prone to eating up the watch’s battery life, and most Wirecutter staffers who signed up for a data plan on their Apple Watch—which costs an extra $5 to $10 a month on the major carriers and isn’t available on others—have since cancelled it.

The 2nd gen Apple Watch SE with a white strap showing an abstract picture of a face as a background.
Photo: Michael Hession

Budget pick

The SE offers many of the same key features as the Series 9, minus an always-on display and certain health-tracking tools, for a much lower price.

Buying Options

$230 $190 from Amazon

You save $40 (17%)

The Apple Watch SE (2nd generation) is a perfect choice if you’ve never owned a smartwatch before or you’re buying one as a gift for a kid or a parent. It does many of the same things the Apple Watch Series 9 does, though it has a few notable omissions. The smaller screen lacks an always-on mode, so you can’t see the time at a glance, and the SE doesn’t support fast charging. The SE also lacks the Series 9’s advanced health features, such as ECG, blood-oxygen monitoring, and temperature sensors for sophisticated menstrual tracking. Those missing features make the Series 9 a more well-rounded device for most people, but if you don’t consider them to be important, you’ll be happy with the SE.

The SE is smaller than the Series 9. It comes in 40 mm and 44 mm case sizes, in contrast to the 41 mm and 45 mm Series 9 models, so folks with smaller wrists might find the SE a more comfortable fit. Otherwise, the two watches are hard to tell apart at a glance, though the Series 9’s always-on screen might be a dead giveaway.

Its health features aren’t as advanced as the Series 9’s, but they’re still useful. If you choose the SE over the Series 9, you give up blood-oxygen monitoring, ECG capability, and body-temperature readings. But if you’re not concerned about the possibility of atrial fibrillation (which the ECG feature can detect), and you don’t have menstrual cycles, the Series 9 is probably not worth spending an extra $150 on. The same goes for the blood-oxygen sensor, which seemed potentially useful at the height of the pandemic but doesn’t actually promise to detect any sort of illness. Low blood-oxygen levels can be a sign of a respiratory illness such as COVID-19, but depending on how severe your case is, your blood-oxygen levels may be completely normal.

The SE offers useful health features such as alerts for high and low heart rate and irregular heart rhythm, which can be indicators of heart-health issues. Like the Series 9, the SE is an accurate fitness tracker, and it’s water resistant for swim tracking.

The bands are easy to change: Just press the small oval buttons on the watch’s underside to release and slide them out. Photo: Michael Hession

Its emergency features make it worth buying for a family member. If you’re looking for a smartwatch to buy for someone you love, such as a child or an aging parent, the SE has the same safety features as the pricier Series 9, including an emergency SOS feature that lets you call emergency services with a long press of the side button and then share your location with trusted contacts. The SE can also detect falls or car crashes and alert your loved ones.

The lack of an always-on display is noticeable. If you’ve never used a smartwatch before, you might not miss an always-on display, but if you have, or if you want a watch primarily to tell time, the SE’s black screen is simply not as useful as the Series 9’s always-on one. You can raise your wrist or tap the display to activate it, but that’s not as convenient for seeing the time.

But the lower price makes it worth a look. The Apple Watch Series 9 is an excellent smartwatch, but at a starting price of $400, it might be a little too expensive for some people—especially if you’re on the fence about using a smartwatch to begin with. The Apple Watch SE is $150 cheaper, and although you lose out on some of the more advanced features and can’t always see what time it is, the SE is a great device for the price.

The Apple Watch Ultra 2 with a white band with blue and orange accents, showing a blue and orange clock face.
Photo: Michael Hession

Upgrade pick

In the Ultra 2, you get all the Series 9’s flagship features, plus a whole lot more, such as lengthy battery life and a rugged design—but it’ll cost you.

Buying Options

I’ll be honest: The Apple Watch Ultra 2 is entirely too much smartwatch for most people, both in a literal, physical sense and from a feature perspective. But its gigantic display, rugged design, lengthy battery life, and slew of advanced fitness features make it the best smartwatch for triathletes, hikers, divers, or other more endurance-oriented wearers—or anyone who simply wants a smartwatch with a huge screen that takes days to die. You pay double the cost of a Series 9 for all of that, but for some people, it’s worth the investment.

The Ultra 2 is just as gigantic as the first-gen version. Nothing has changed design-wise for the new model, though it has a brighter screen (up to 3,000 nits, in contrast to the original Ultra’s 2,000-nit capability) and is now made of 95% recycled titanium instead of virgin metal.

If you’re turned off by the computer-on-your-wrist look that a big smartwatch can have—especially if your wrists are on the smaller side—the Ultra 2 is not for you. Its 49 mm case is a full 4 mm larger than that of the bigger Series 9 version, which gives it almost 7% more screen area. Though I love being able to see more information at a glance, as a person whose wrists measure 6 inches around, I find the Ultra 2 uncomfortable to wear to sleep, and it slides around when I exercise. Folks with similar wrist measurements may prefer the Series 9 instead. The titanium case surrounds the Ultra 2’s flat-edged display, so this watch looks more utilitarian than the softer, rounded Series 9 and SE, but the design also protects the sapphire-crystal screen from scratches.

Photo: Michael Hession

The battery life is excellent. Like the Ultra, the Ultra 2 is a long-lasting Apple Watch by an order of magnitude. You can eke out close to one and a half days of battery life wearing the Series 9 to track daily workouts and sleep, and the Ultra 2 easily doubles that. Apple promises 36 hours on a charge, but after 48 hours of wearing the watch to manage notifications, send messages, and track sleep and workouts, I still had 45% battery left. Activating the Ultra 2’s Low Power Mode makes it last even longer.

The Ultra 2 has a button that the other watches don’t. In addition to the Digital Crown, which is 30% larger on the Ultra 2 than on the smaller, cheaper Apple Watches, with deeper grooves, and the traditional side button, the Ultra 2 has an orange Action button on the left edge of the case that serves as a shortcut for specific apps. Normally you would need to use an Apple Watch complication to hop into an app to launch a workout, for instance, but if you’re an athlete wearing gloves, poking at a touchscreen is inconvenient or even impossible. Now, you can press the Action button to start a specific exercise, among other tasks, and you can create custom shortcuts for the button using the Shortcuts app.

Double Tap gestures make the Ultra 2 easier to use. The feature, which lets you interact with notifications by double-tapping your thumb and index finger together, works the same on the Series 9 and the Ultra 2. I wore a pair of thick The North Face winter gloves to test the gesture, and it could be a useful way to interact with the watch while doing winter sports.

This is a smartwatch for endurance athletes. Like the Ultra, the Ultra 2 has precision dual-frequency GPS, so the watch can use both L1 and L5 frequencies to lock in your location more accurately. Most smartwatches, in contrast, use only one frequency, which is why GPS on those devices can sometimes struggle to pinpoint your location in cities with tall buildings or lots of tree cover; with an additional frequency, that should be less of a problem. The Ultra 2 can also work as a diving watch, as it’s equipped with a depth sensor that can calculate water submersion up to 40 meters. When setting up the Ultra 2, you can choose to activate the Depth app automatically when the watch senses that you’ve jumped into water.

Unlike other Apple Watch models, the Ultra 2 comes equipped with an 86-decibel siren, which you can activate with a long press of the Action button. This allows the watch to emit a loud-pitched SOS that repeats in two patterns known to emergency responders—which it can maintain for hours, depending on battery life—if you’re lost. The siren is, safe to say, extremely loud.

But it represents a very, very minor upgrade over last year’s model. If you own the original Apple Watch Ultra, there’s no need to upgrade to the Apple Watch Ultra 2. And although Apple no longer sells the original Ultra, if you find one from a third-party retailer on sale, it’s worth buying over the pricier Ultra 2. The Ultra 2 has a brighter screen and a more powerful processor with on-device Siri and the convenient Double Tap feature, which are all nice to have, but they’re not essential.

The usefulness of watch apps varies widely. Apps have improved dramatically since the Apple Watch’s early days—and developers have figured out what people will use those apps for—but figuring out what you need on your watch takes some trial and error. Apps designed for tracking workouts, sending messages, or streaming audio are great to have on your wrist. Social media apps and ride-hailing services? Not so much. The utility of an Apple Watch depends entirely on what you need it to do.

Battery life on most models could be better. An Apple Watch Series 9 or an Apple Watch SE easily lasts for a day on a charge, but if you’re doing anything demanding—using cellular connectivity, navigating with Maps for an extended period, tracking a long workout—you may find your watch in Power Reserve mode by the end of the day. The Apple Watch Ultra 2 is the exception, but its bigger battery will cost you.

The Apple Watch Series 8 is discontinued, but you may still see it around as stores try to sell their leftover inventory. If you can find it for $350 or less, we recommend it. The only things you miss out on versus the Series 9 are features powered by the S9 chip, including Double Tap and on-device Siri. We don’t recommend buying anything older than a Series 4, because the latest version of watchOS doesn’t support the early Apple Watches. (The Series 4 is likely on its last legs, so we’d recommend a later model, like the Series 7, over an older one.)

Few other iOS-compatible smartwatches are available. Some wrist-worn fitness trackers can relay notifications from your iPhone in a limited manner, but you should consider these devices strictly if you want a good fitness tracker and nothing else, and if you’re willing to give up all of the other things an Apple Watch can do.

Similarly, you can find dedicated GPS running watches that are more full-featured fitness trackers than the Apple Watch (at least the Series 9 and SE), but they aren’t true smartwatches. If you’re confused about which type of wearable is best for you, check out our comparison of smartwatches, fitness trackers, and running watches.

A handful of smartwatches that still run on Google’s older Wear OS platform can work with an iPhone via an iOS app, but interacting with those watches is nowhere near as seamless as using an Apple Watch. Watches that run on Google’s newer Android wearables platform, including Samsung’s latest Galaxy Watch models and Google’s own Pixel Watch, aren’t compatible with iPhones at all.

This article was edited by Signe Brewster and Arthur Gies.

Meet your guide

Caitlin McGarry

Caitlin McGarry is a senior editor at Wirecutter. She previously oversaw Gizmodo’s consumer technology coverage and has been reviewing Apple products and wearable devices for almost a decade.

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