Can you feel the tension rising? It’s just a matter of a few short hours before Apple’s biggest event of the year. On Tuesday, September 12 at 10 a.m. Pacific, in a pre-recorded keynote broadcast to press at the Steve Jobs Theater and to the rest of the world via apple.com, the Apple TV app and the Apple YouTube channel—you can set a reminder for that here.
Much of the keynote will be dedicated to the iPhone 15 series, of course, and there will be a mention of the AirPods Pro being redesigned with a USB-C connector in the case, it seems.
And then there’s the Apple Watch. We can expect Apple Watch Series 9 in two sizes, 42mm and 45mm cases as now, plus a second-generation Apple Watch Ultra, possibly in a new and exciting color case. It looks like they will be released on Friday, September 22.
The Series 9 expectations are that the design won’t have changed from Series 8, which itself looked just like Series 7, though there may be new colors, perhaps. The changes, then, will all be internal. We have already been promised a significantly faster processor, but it now seems that won’t be the full extent of the internal upgrades.
In a new report for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman has shed some light on what the new Watches will boast. First, he corroborates previous rumors of a speed boost, saying, “The big focus for the Apple Watch this year will be performance, with the company planning to heavily tout major gains in processing speed.” The biggest jump since Series 6, it’s believed.
Greater power may mean new features such as wider implementation of how the temperature sensor introduced last year is used.
But Gurman claims there will be “a new version of Apple’s optical heart rate sensor.” This will be a fourth-generation sensor. The Apple Watch SE has the second-gen optical heart sensor and Series 8 has the third-generation model. But an upgrade is coming, it seems.
There are no further details of what the new sensor might manage, but greater accuracy is likely to be top of the list.
Another new sensor is predicted, the U2 ultra wideband chip which seems to be coming to the new iPhones, too. This chip will help improve Find My capabilities, it’s thought.
Gurman also says that there will be a different way of building the Watch, with some stainless-steel models being manufactured through 3D printing, which is an amazingly cool development. It won’t be every stainless steel Watch, at least, not yet.
Finally, just as Apple may be moving away from leather iPhone cases, it could delete leather Watch bands from the range, Gurman claims. There’s also a suggestion that the stainless steel link bracelet may be discontinued, too, in which case it could be a year of subtle but important changes for Apple Watch this year.
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