The Apple Watch Is the Best Smartwatch for iPhone Owners

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 sleep apnea detection 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 were the first devices to reach that goal (when paired with specific watch bands), and the Series 10 joins the lineup. 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 10 is the best smartwatch that Apple sells right now. 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 despite a slimmer design and larger display than previous models, the Series 10 doesn’t feel like a huge upgrade if you own a Series 7 or 8. If you have a Series 9, you should hang onto it, and if you can find one on sale, it’s still worth buying. If you have an older Apple Watch that can be updated to watchOS 11, those software improvements will more meaningfully change your Apple Watch experience than the Series 10 will.

But if you have a Series 5 or 6, the Series 10 will feel like a dramatic upgrade. With fast performance, a big, bright screen, faster charging, and a slew of health and fitness features, the Apple Watch Series 10 is the best smartwatch for most people. It isn’t exciting, but it is worth buying.

The Series 10 has a giant screen and slimmer profile. The new watch comes in 42 mm and 46 mm case sizes, a slight size increase from the Series 9, but it has a much larger display due to some design tweaks. The front crystal now cascades over the sides of the watch, making it more screen than metal casing. Apple is also using an OLED screen with a wider viewing angle, so the display is more visible when your wrist is down or tilted at an angle. The redesign means an extra line of text is now visible on the watch without decreasing the font size, and the buttons on-screen are larger, which makes them easier to tap. Typing out a text without misspelling words is easier than on previous watches.

The screen is a big upgrade from a Series 4, 5, or 6, which share the same small display in 40 mm and 44 mm case sizes, and it is even a noticeable bump up from the Series 7, 8, and 9, which were available in 41 mm and 45 mm. The 46 mm Series 10 has 3% more active screen area than even the gigantic Apple Watch Ultra 2 while being 3 mm smaller overall. (This makes the Ultra 2, our upgrade pick, slightly less compelling, but the bigger watch’s impressive battery life remains a selling point.)

Apple redesigned the back of the Series 10 to bake the cellular antenna directly into the metal, making the watch noticeably thinner. The overall result feels sleeker and lighter on the wrist than previous models, even though the Series 10 is larger, wider, and has thicker bezels than the Series 9.

Sleep apnea detection could be life-changing, but it’s too early to tell. The Series 10 uses its built-in accelerometer to detect breathing disturbances if you wear the watch to track your sleep for at least 10 nights in a 30-day period. If you experience an elevated number of breathing disturbances on half of those nights, the Apple Watch will alert you to potential moderate or severe sleep apnea. You can export your sleep data in the Health app on your iPhone to show a physician and discuss an official diagnosis and treatment.

The feature, which has been cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration to accurately detect sleep apnea, could meaningfully affect an Apple Watch user’s life by alerting them to a potentially serious health condition (similar to the watch’s atrial fibrillation alerts). According to the American Medical Association, about 30 million adults in the US have sleep apnea, a condition that causes a person to stop breathing while they sleep, but only 6 million have been diagnosed. Symptoms include snoring, tiredness while awake, and mood swings from lack of sleep. And if left untreated, the condition can lead to a cascade of serious health issues, including type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure.

I’ve been wearing the Series 10 to track my sleep for the last week and have experienced no breathing disturbances, which is reassuring. But Wirecutter’s sleep experts plan to do in-depth research and testing of the new feature and compare it to other sleep-tracking wearables (some of which also offer sleep apnea detection), and we’ll update this guide with their findings.

It’s important to note that the breathing disturbances report isn’t designed for people who have already been diagnosed with sleep apnea. Also, Apple is releasing sleep apnea detection as a feature for the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2, too, so you don’t necessarily need to buy Series 10 to use it.

The battery life remains unchanged, but charging is much faster. Apple has been promising all-day battery life since the first Apple Watch, and the same is true of the Series 10. In real-world use, we found it lasted closer to 36 hours, even when tracking workouts and sleep.

But the Series 10 did get a meaningful fast-charging upgrade. An 8-minute charge boosted a dead watch to 21%, which was enough to track a night of sleep, and a 15-minute charge took the Series 10 from 0% to 35%. I was able to squeeze out another 14 hours of battery life after that charge, including tracking sleep and a 40-minute cardio and strength workout. The watch takes about 50 minutes to juice up fully. This has made a huge difference for me, a person who has developed chaotic charging habits now that I work from home all the time. I’ll plop a watch (or my phone) on a charger for a few minutes, intending to charge it fully, before realizing I need to unplug it for some reason or another. (But charging a device to 100% every day is bad for its battery anyway.)

You can jam out to music straight from the Apple Watch’s speaker. The Series 10 is the only Apple Watch that lets you play songs or podcasts out loud without connecting a pair of Bluetooth headphones. This is useful in very specific scenarios, like when you’re all alone, your phone is out of reach, and you want to listen to a podcast clip or a new song without grabbing your earbuds. And the sound quality is decent: Listening to the latest Sabrina Carpenter single on my wrist wasn’t as good as listening on my phone with a pair of good headphones, but it got the job done. It was weird that Apple restricted the speaker support on older Apple Watches to FaceTime Audio calls, so this move means you no longer have to think about what you can and can’t play on your watch.

It’s plenty powerful. With Apple’s latest S10 system-on-chip, the Series 10 is responsive and exhibits little to no lag, even when you’re asking Siri (everyone’s voice-activated nemesis) to handle tasks. Siri handles 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 10 is fast.

It has all the health, fitness, and emergency safety features you could want. In addition to sleep apnea detection, the Series 10 has two temperature sensors for more granular menstrual tracking 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.

The watchOS 11 software upgrade that comes preinstalled on the Series 10 brings useful new features (and older Apple Watches also benefit from installing the update). You can now translate languages by using voice dictation on your wrist using the new Apple Watch Translate app, and the update also includes a slew of useful health and fitness features. Some of my favorites include the ability to pause your activity rings for a day, so you don’t feel pressure to work out when you’re sick, plus a new training load metric that lets you see how much effort you’re exerting during exercise and adjust your workout plan accordingly. A new Vitals app takes your measurements, including respiratory rate, resting heart rate, and wrist temperature, while you sleep, and it gives you a daily report of how those vitals compare to your personal baseline. The reports could signal if something is wrong.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The size creep is real. The biggest Apple Watch was once 42 mm, and the smallest 38 mm. The Series 10 comes in 42 mm and 46 mm case sizes, which feel and look larger than the 41 mm and 45 mm Series 9. And those on the petite end of the spectrum may find that the slow size increase over the years makes the smaller Apple Watch a little too big for us.

Blood oxygen measurements are no longer available. The Series 10 has a blood oxygen sensor baked into its hardware, but due to a legal tussle, Apple has pulled the Blood Oxygen watch app from Apple Watches it sells. If you bought an Apple Watch prior to late December 2023, you still have access to the blood oxygen measurements, so if that’s an important feature for you, you might want to reconsider upgrading to a Series 10.

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 canceled it.

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 10 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 10’s advanced health features, such as ECG, sleep apnea detection, and temperature sensors for sophisticated menstrual tracking. Those missing features make the Series 10 a more well-rounded device for those who care about their health, but if you don’t consider them to be important, you’ll be happy with the SE.

The SE is smaller than the Series 10. It comes in 40 mm and 44 mm case sizes, in contrast to the 42 mm and 46 mm Series 10 models, so folks with smaller wrists might find the SE a more comfortable fit. The Series 10 also has an always-on screen, which the SE lacks.

Its health features aren’t as advanced as the Series 10’s, but they’re still useful. If you choose the SE over the Series 10, you give up sleep apnea detection, ECG capability, and body-temperature readings. But if you’re not concerned about the possibility of atrial fibrillation (which the ECG feature can detect), you don’t suffer from sleep disruptions, and you don’t have menstrual cycles, the Series 10 is probably not worth spending an extra $150 on.

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 10, the SE is an accurate fitness tracker, and it’s water resistant for swim tracking.

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 10, 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 10’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 10 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.

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 10 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. The two share the same design, though the Ultra 2 has a brighter screen (up to 3,000 nits, in contrast to the original Ultra’s 2,000-nit capability), is made of 95% recycled titanium instead of virgin metal, and comes in a new satin black version.

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 3 mm larger than the bigger Series 10, but it has less active screen area than that smaller (and cheaper) Apple Watch. Though I love being able to see tons of 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 42 mm Series 10 instead. The titanium case surrounds the Ultra 2’s flat-edged display, so this watch looks more utilitarian than the softer, rounded Series 10 and SE, but the design also protects the sapphire-crystal screen from scratches.

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 10 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 10 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 the first-gen Ultra. 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 Apple Watch Series 9 is no longer sold by Apple, 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 really miss out on versus the Series 10 are a larger display and faster charging. We don’t recommend buying anything older than a Series 6, because the latest version of watchOS doesn’t support earlier Apple Watches.

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 10 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.