The Apple Watch Series 12 delivers one of the line’s biggest generational leaps in years and ushers in a new era for Apple wearables. Armed with an entirely redesigned health array that tracks heart rate data every five seconds, a faster S11 chip driving context-aware Siri AI, and a massive jump to 54 hours of real-world battery life, it addresses longstanding user complaints while delivering more flagship features. Starting at the same $399 price as its predecessor, the Series 12 is a better value than ever, making it our Editors’ Choice smartwatch for most iPhone users.
Everything you need to know about the new Apple Watch features
The Apple Watch Series 12 starts at $399 for the base 42mm aluminum model (Bluetooth-only), maintaining the same entry price as the Series 11. Upgrading to the larger 46mm case costs $449, which is $20 higher than last year’s size differential. Regardless of size, adding 5G cellular service costs an extra $100. The aluminum Series 12 is available in Black, Dark Bronze, Light Gold, or Space Gray.
The Series 12 comes in multiple case options and finishes (Credit: Eric Zeman)
Like the Series 11, the Series 12 comes in a titanium case if you’re looking for a sturdier build. The titanium model comes in a Natural or Radiant Gold finish and starts at $699 for 42mm or $749 for 46mm, each with built-in cellular service by default.
New to this generation, you can also get a Series 12 with a ceramic case, for an extra-premium look and feel. The Ceramic models also have built-in cellular service and start at $899 for 42mm or $949 for 46mm. Ceramic is available in Night Blue or Pearl White.
I felt fancy wearing the Hermès Series 12 (Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
The line tops off with an Hermès version in titanium with exclusive band styles, priced at $1,399 for 42mm or $1,499 for 46mm.
The Series 12 launches alongside the Apple Watch Ultra 4, which comes in a single 49mm titanium build with cellular connectivity for $799.
Left to right: Apple Watch Ultra 4, Series 12 (Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
While Apple has held the line on the Series 12’s $399 starting price, its biggest competitors have raised their prices this year. Google bumped the Pixel Watch 5 by $50, bringing it to an identical $399 base price as Apple’s entry model. Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 9 remains the cheapest of the three, but a $30 price hike brings its new baseline to $379.99—narrowing the price gap between Apple and Android wearables considerably.
For the most part, the Apple Watch Series 12 mirrors its predecessor in look and feel. I tested the 46mm aluminum model, which features an upgraded Ceramic Shield front cover—a display Apple claims is 60% tougher than the Series 11’s Ion-X glass. Otherwise, durability remains unchanged: Both generations carry an IP6X dust-resistance rating and WR50 water resistance (submersible down to 164 feet). By comparison, the Apple Watch Ultra 4 matches the Series 12 in dust protection but doubles its water resistance, adds EN13319 dive certification, and has a MIL-STD-810H rating for extreme environments.
The Series 12 is slightly wider and heavier than its predecessor (Credit: Eric Zeman)
Different variations of the watch change the measurements slightly, with titanium models increasing the weight, and ceramic further upping it to as much as 1.9 ounces for the 46mm in Night Blue (interestingly, the same size in Pearl White weighs slightly less at 1.8 ounces).
Ultimately, the design differences from the last generation are so small that I barely noticed them, even when examining the models side by side, and I couldn’t feel a weight difference.
Otherwise, all versions of the Series 12 have the same LTPO3 wide-angle OLED Retina screen as the Series 11. It reaches 2,000 nits of adaptive brightness, with a minimum of 1 nit. Display area and pixel count remain unchanged from the last generation: 970mm with 374 by 446 pixels for the 42mm model, and 1,196mm with 416 by 496 pixels for the 46mm model.
Using the Series 12 or updating an older Apple Watch to watchOS 27 requires an iPhone 11 or later running iOS 27.
Apple’s latest smartwatch makes using Siri smoother and faster than ever, thanks to its new S11 chip with a 64-bit dual-core processor. The chip has upgraded CPU and GPU power as well as a better neural engine.
The Series 12 has the same 64GB storage capacity as the Series 11.
Apple’s artificial intelligence is a key part of the Series 12’s upgrades. The Siri AI app is front and center in watchOS 27. Pressing the crown no longer pulls up the entire app drawer. Instead, it shows a small circle of recommended and recently used apps with Siri AI always in the middle. Hit the bottom icon or rotate the crown to see the rest of your apps.
The Siri AI app tracks past conversations, both for real-time reference and to build context for future inquiries. The Siri AI app on my iPhone 17 successfully showed my conversation history, pulling in all my questions and responses, even from interactions I had on my watch. The Siri AI app on my watch didn’t show the same conversations as it’s supposed to, but hopefully, this is a minor bug that can be patched soon.
Siri can provide detailed information about local activities (Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
You can access Siri by holding down the digital crown or simply by saying the “Hey Siri” wake words. The AI-enabled version of Apple’s digital assistant is more conversational than ever. It can answer general knowledge questions and use personal context from compatible apps. You can ask about progress on your activity rings, for example, or have it search your email for flight information or your driver’s license number.
I used it to make weekend plans by asking what was going on in my home city of Chicago, and then for further details about the festivals and events it listed that I found interesting. Siri told me the dates and times for Riot Fest at Douglass Park, the headliners for each night, and then showed me directions from my place.
Besides Siri AI, watchOS 27 adds new widgets to the customizable Smart Stack, such as one from Shazam that will automatically pull up the name of any song playing in the background. You can browse these widgets by scrolling up on the crown, and you can select one with a single tap of your thumb and your forefinger. The previous double-tap gesture now scrolls the Smart Stack.
The Siri AI app is central to watchOS 27 (Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
The AI-powered Workout Buddy, which offers encouraging words during certain exercises, has also improved with watchOS 27. It now works without your phone if you have a cellular signal on your watch, and provides more detailed personal context. Cycle tracking gets an upgrade with watchOS 27 as well, adding support for perimenopause and menopause.
On paper, Apple has kept the Series 12’s battery estimate steady at 24 hours, maintaining the baseline jump introduced with the Series 11 (up from the historical 18-hour standard). But Apple has a habit of underpromising on stamina, and the Series 12 continues to quietly overdeliver in testing.
The Series 12 battery lasted more than two days in testing (Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
In real-world use, with the always-on display enabled and one tracked exercise with GPS each day, the Series 12 lasted an impressive 54.5 hours. The Series 11 lasted 43 hours under the same conditions.
It almost matches the Pixel Watch 5, which lasted 56.5 hours between charges under similar conditions. Both models are well ahead of the Galaxy Watch 9, which lasted just 26 hours in testing.
The Series 12 charges more quickly than its predecessor, returning to 100% in 55 minutes using the included magnetic puck and my own 18W brick. The Series 11 needed 77 minutes to recharge under the same circumstances.
Flip the Series 12 over, look closely, and you can see a handful of small visual changes from the Series 11 resulting from the entirely redesigned health sensing system. From the inside out, the green LEDs are larger, yet more power-efficient. Denser photodiodes surround these LEDs to capture more data than before. The electrodes on the outermost ring have similarly increased in density to provide greater surface area within roughly the same footprint, allowing for better skin contact and more accurate ECG readings.
The redesigned health sensors (Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
This system takes both heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) readings significantly more frequently over the course of the day compared with the last generation’s sensors. For heart rate, the Series 12 takes a reading every five seconds, up from once every five minutes. For HRV, it now collects data every five minutes instead of every two hours.
Heart Rate App: Real-Time Stress Tracking and Recovery HRV
The Heart Rate app on the watch provides richer data than before. The main page shows your current value, and a two-minute history of measurements on a line graph. Scroll down for your heart rate range for the day, and a chart of those values over time. The next two pages show graphs of your average resting heart rate and average heart rate while walking for the day.
The new sensors enable more heart rate data (Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
The last page shows HRV details. Here, you’ll see your recovery HRV, a metric that monitors stress and fatigue. Prior Apple Watches focused more on overall HRV, a similar but slightly different metric used to assess cardiovascular health and monitor for irregular rhythms.
I enjoyed perusing this app after a Sunday of watching football. I went for a run that morning and saw similar heart rate spikes during the stressful parts of an overtime game my favorite team played in.
The Heart Rate app now shows recovery HRV (Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
New watch complications let you add a heart rate widget to your watch face and check your real-time beats per minute (bpm) with a quick glance at your wrist. During the football game, this provided a handy visual reminder that I needed to calm down.
Vitals App: All-Day Trend Monitoring to Catch Illness Early
More frequent HRV readings also enable new features and metrics in the Vitals app. The overnight view shows how your trends compare with an established baseline as before, but recovery HRV is now one of the included metrics along with heart rate, respiratory rate, and wrist temperature.
The Vitals app now tracks HRV (Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
You can now switch to a daytime view, as the watch takes enough measurements to update your trends throughout the day. This helps keep you up to date earlier if you start showing signs of stress, burnout, or illness. The daytime view shows overall trends, heart rate, recovery HRV, and a new metric called Readiness.
Readiness Score: Dynamic Daily Guidance That Adapts as You Move
Readiness takes seven nights of sleep to establish a baseline, then provides a score from 0 to 10 each morning based on your activity, overnight vitals, and sleep score. In addition to appearing in the Vitals app, Readiness has its own app and is designed to help you plan the intensity of your workouts based on your current well-being.
Google, Samsung, and others have long had similar scores that assess your readiness for the day, with recommendations for workout intensity. One differentiator is that Apple’s score adapts throughout the day in response to meaningful shifts, so it can drop after an intense workout to signal that you should take it easy, or rise if you become more rested after a nap. Similar scores from Google and Samsung remain static throughout the day, but both companies provide a separate workout-specific metric that updates as you complete activities.
My activity and vitals helped my score, but I didn’t get enough sleep (Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
Apple also provides an assessment based on your readiness and vitals. For instance, I received a score of 5, and the app identified my short night’s sleep as the main negative factor. Given that my fitness and vitals otherwise contributed positively, it determined that I was “ready” for the day.
While Apple’s AI assessments are simple, they are offered at no additional cost. Google’s wearables provide health scores and tracking for free, but the company’s highly advanced AI Health Coach comes with a $9.99 monthly premium.
Aside from the new heart rate tracking system, the Series 12 maintains its predecessor’s sensor array, which includes an accelerometer, an altimeter, an ambient light sensor, a blood oxygen sensor, a compass, a depth gauge, a gyroscope, and a water temperature sensor. It also has a built-in single-frequency GPS.
I tested the Series 12’s exercise tracking during a walk around my neighborhood, a 30-minute run, and a 60-minute high-intensity interval training (HIIT) session, with the Fitbit-powered Google Pixel Watch 5 on my other wrist and the Wahoo Trackr Heart Rate strapped to my chest.
During the first five minutes of the HIIT exercise on my second day of testing, the Series 12’s heart rate numbers were low by 10 to 20bpm, and grayed out at one point, which made it seem like it was having trouble getting a reading.
Workout details from the Series 12 (Credit: Apple/PCMag)
After five minutes, the Series 12 started to show accurate heart rate values. The issue reoccurred during the run but lasted only 30 seconds instead of a few minutes, so it’s likely a calibration issue or a glitch in watchOS 27. Regardless, I don’t think it’s a major concern, as it didn’t meaningfully skew the data from the rest of the workout or the assessments and charts afterward.
During my run, the Series 12 stayed right in line with the readings from my chest strap, deintervals. Afterward, its maximum heart rate was closer to the chest strap reading and differed by about 5bpm from the Pixel Watch 5, while all three showed a similar average heart rate
The Apple Watch Series 12 can track a wide range of different sports and activities, but for HIIT, it only shows time, calories burned, and average heart rate, along with a chart of my heart rate throughout the workout. For running, it also shows advanced form metrics such as cadence, ground contact time, stride length, and vertical oscillation.
During the night, the Apple Watch Series 12 tracks heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, and recovery HRV. It also measures the amount and depth of your slumber, and charts your sleep cycles over time. The watch gives you a sleep score from 0 to 100, with a clear breakdown of how duration, bedtime, and interruptions affected it.
I tested the Series 12 over several nights of sleep while wearing the Pixel Watch 5 on my other wrist. Its sleep cycle numbers roughly matched both my anecdotal experience and the values from Google’s watch. Its sleep score also mostly lined up with my expectations, falling to 79, or “fair,” one weekend after I went to bed and then got up much later than usual. Otherwise, it was low after a rough night, and as high as 90 on other nights when I stuck to my schedule and got a decent amount of rest.
My sleep score took a hit after I slept in on a Saturday morning (Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
Some of the Series 12’s coolest features are still on the way.
Audio Intelligence: Live Rewinds, Meeting Recaps, and Privacy Safeguards
Powered by the S11 chip, Audio Intelligence comprises four new capabilities. By double-tapping the crown, Live Rewind lets you see a transcript of your last 15 seconds of conversation. Siri Recap takes high-level notes of your conversations throughout the day and creates bulleted summaries. Sound Recognition can alert hard-of-hearing individuals to sounds such as blaring alarms and barking dogs. The Shazam widget mentioned above also uses Audio Intelligence, and that feature is live now.
Live Rewind and Siri Recap both raise privacy concerns, but Apple says all audio is stored and processed in a Secure Exclave on the S11 chip. The audio is protected with end-to-end encryption when sent to the iPhone for Siri Recaps, and is not saved as audio, only as the AI-processed files, and is never shared with Apple.
Live Rewind overwrites audio as the 15 seconds elapse unless the feature is triggered, and Siri Recap can be programmed to activate only during certain times or at certain locations, like your workplace. It won’t attribute any audio to individual speakers; instead, it just focuses on the information relayed.
All aspects of Audio Intelligence will be opt-in, so you’ll have to manually enable them, meaning you can easily leave them off if you’re not comfortable with the privacy implications. I’m excited to try them since I sometimes struggle to understand fast speakers, and I’d find it useful to have bullet points summarizing my meetings during the workday.
iPhone Health App: Dynamic Insights and the New Longevity Tab
The existing Health app on iPhone will be overhauled later this year. The main Insights tab will be more dynamic, surfacing relevant tiles throughout the day to the top of the page.
A new Longevity tab will show your Health Age compared with your actual age based on your HRV, sleep, and VO2 Max (the maximum volume of oxygen that your body can use during a workout, a key indicator of cardio fitness). It can guide you through fitness assessments and provide information on how to improve your Health Age, along with a pie chart showing how different aspects of your well-being have changed over time, such as activity, sleep, and stress.
I look forward to testing these new features and changes, and will update this review once I do.
Final Thoughts
Apple Watch Series 12
Editors’ Choice
4.5
Outstanding
What Our Ratings Mean
- 5.0 – Exemplary: Near perfection, ground-breaking
- 4.5 – Outstanding: Best in class, acts as a benchmark for measuring competitors
- 4.0 – Excellent: A performance, feature, or value leader in its class, with few shortfalls
- 3.5 – Good: Does what the product should do, and does so better than many competitors
- 3.0 – Average: Does what the product should do, and sits in the middle of the pack
- 2.5 – Fair: We have some reservations, buy with caution
- 2.0 – Subpar: We do not recommend, buy with extreme caution
- 1.5 – Poor: Do not buy this product
- 1.0 – Dismal: Don’t even think about buying this product
Read Our
Editorial Mission Statement
and
Testing Methodologies.
The Apple Watch Series 12 isn’t just an incremental update; it’s a definitive leap forward. Even with headline features like Audio Intelligence still on the horizon, the core experience is noticeably transformed by context-aware Siri AI, lightning-fast S11 performance, and sensor upgrades that track your heart rate every five seconds. The ultra-durable Apple Watch Ultra 4 is a compelling alternative for extreme outdoor adventurers, but with an impressive 54-hour battery life and an unchanged $399 base price, the Series 12 comfortably claims our Editors’ Choice award as the undisputed top pick for most iPhone users.
SHOULD I UPGRADE?
If you’re on a Series 11, it depends, but for almost everyone else, absolutely. While the design remains familiar, the jump to 50-plus hours of real-world battery life completely changes how you use the watch. Between the faster S11 chip driving smart, contextual Siri AI and redesigned sensors that capture heart rate data every five seconds instead of every five minutes, the Series 12 offers meaningful daily utility that older models simply can’t match.
About Our Expert
Andrew Gebhart
Senior Writer, Smart Home and Wearables
Experience
I’m PCMag’s senior writer covering smart home and wearable devices. I’ve been reporting on tech professionally for nearly a decade and have been obsessing about it for much longer than that. Prior to joining PCMag, I made educational videos for an electronics store called Abt Electronics in Illinois, and before that, I spent eight years covering the smart home market for CNET.
I foster many flavors of nerdom in my personal life. I’m an avid board gamer and video gamer. I love fantasy football, which I view as a combination of role-playing games and sports. Plus, I can talk to you about craft beer for hours and am on a personal quest to have a flight of beer at each microbrewery in my home city of Chicago.
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