Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4: A Faster Chip, No Redesign, and Blood Sugar Slips to 2030

Every September Apple puts a new watch on stage, and most years there is at least one thing on the list worth getting slightly excited about. A bigger screen. Satellite messaging. A sensor that does something your last watch could not.

This year, on the current reporting, there is not one.

Mark Gurman’s latest read on the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 is about as flat as these previews get: a faster chip, some unspecified health and fitness improvements, and no meaningful design change from the Series 11 and Ultra 3 you can buy today. The features people keep asking about are either not coming, not ready, or now sitting so far out that they belong to a different decade.

That is worth writing about honestly rather than dressing up. Here is what is actually expected in September, what has quietly been ruled out, and why the one feature that would genuinely change what an Apple Watch is for has just slipped again.

A Faster Chip, and That Is the Headline

The confirmed-ish centrepiece is a new processor delivering a genuine speed increase, which Gurman frames as the first real performance jump in the Apple Watch in several years.

Do not roll your eyes at it too quickly. Apple Watch silicon has been close to static for a long time, and the S-series chip has been getting by on efficiency gains rather than raw speed. If you have ever waited for a watch app to load, or watched the thing think about it before Siri responds, you have met the ceiling.

There is also a strategic reason the chip matters more than usual now. Apple is pushing on-device intelligence everywhere, and a watch is the hardest place to run any of it. Small battery, no room for cooling, and a user who expects an instant answer from a device on their wrist. A faster, more capable chip is the groundwork for Siri on the Watch being tolerable rather than something you give up on.

Groundwork is still the right word, though. Nobody upgrades a watch because the processor benchmarks better.

The Shape Is Staying Exactly As It Is

Gurman is clear that neither the Series 12 nor the Ultra 4 gets a major design change, and that a proper redesign is one to two years out.

The display supply chain reporting lines up with that, pointing at 2028 at the earliest for the next real design update, with 2027 bringing a panel change instead. That one is worth knowing about even though it is not this year: Apple is reportedly looking at LG Display’s high-mobility oxide backplane technology, which would cut power draw compared with the current LTPO panels. Less power for the screen means more battery for everything else, and on a watch that is the constraint that governs every other decision.

There is one dissenting note. DigiTimes has suggested the Ultra 4 could get a full redesign, which sits awkwardly against everything above. Given Gurman’s record on Apple’s product roadmap versus DigiTimes’ record on Apple’s product roadmap, the sensible position is to expect the Ultra 4 to look like an Ultra 3 and be pleasantly surprised if it does not.

A separate rumour about a redesigned band attachment system is still floating around. If that ever lands it matters more than it sounds, because it would obsolete a decade of bands people have spent real money on, and Apple has been careful to avoid exactly that since 2015.

Three Things That Are Not Happening

The absences tell you more about this year than the additions do.

Touch ID is not coming. This has been rumoured for years, usually as a fingerprint reader built into the display or into a side button Apple has already been rumoured to be rethinking, and Gurman does not expect it. It keeps resurfacing because the problem is real. Face ID is a non-starter on a wrist, so unlocking and authenticating on the Watch still leans on your iPhone or a passcode you tap in with wet hands after a swim. Not this year.

The sensor-in-band idea remains unconfirmed. The theory is that Apple moves some sensing off the watch body and into the strap, which would free up internal space and put contacts closer to the skin. It has never risen above a thin rumour, and nothing in the current reporting supports it for September.

There is no Apple Watch SE this year. This is the one that will actually affect the most people, because the SE is the model that gets a watch onto the wrist of someone who was not sure they wanted one. Anyone waiting for a cheaper entry point is waiting at least another year, which makes the current SE, and whatever it drops to when the new models land, the value play by default. An SE redesign has been on the cards for a while now, and it keeps not arriving.

Blood Sugar Is Now a 2030 Problem

Here is the part that deserves the most attention, and it is not good news.

Non-invasive blood glucose monitoring, the feature that would turn the Apple Watch from a fitness tracker into something genuinely medical for millions of people, is now reported to be targeting 2030. Apple has been working on it for roughly fifteen years. We wrote in January that it might finally be getting real, on the back of reporting that the internal prototypes had reached a promising stage. On the current timeline it is still four years away.

It is worth understanding why this specific feature keeps receding, because it is not Apple being slow.

Reading glucose without drawing blood means shining light into tissue and inferring a concentration from what comes back. The signal is faint, and everything else about a human wrist interferes with it: hydration, skin tone, temperature, how tightly the strap is done up, whether you have just been for a run. A continuous glucose monitor that gets it wrong is not a disappointing gadget, it is a person making an insulin decision on a bad number. That puts it in a regulatory class where “mostly accurate” is not a shippable standard.

So 2030 is plausibly honest rather than pessimistic. It is still four more years of this being the feature everyone asks about and nobody gets.

What “Health Improvements” Probably Means

Gurman’s phrasing on health and fitness is deliberately vague, which usually means refinement rather than a new sensor.

Recent history supports that reading. The Series 11 and Ultra 3 generation led on hypertension notifications, which used the existing optical sensor plus new analysis rather than new hardware. That is Apple’s current pattern: take a sensor already on your wrist, apply better algorithms and a clinical study, ship a feature. Sleep scoring arrived the same way.

DigiTimes has floated high blood pressure notifications for the Ultra 4 via the optical heart rate sensor, though it is genuinely unclear how that would differ from the hypertension notifications already shipping in watchOS 26. Possibly a broader rollout, possibly a more specific measurement, possibly a rumour that has misread an existing feature as a new one.

And it is worth remembering how fragile this area is commercially. Blood oxygen, a feature Apple shipped and advertised for years, was pulled from US models over a patent dispute and came back only through a software workaround. Health features on the Watch are not just an engineering problem. They are a legal one.

The Ultra 4 Has a Harder Job Than the Series 12

Spare a thought for the Ultra line, which has a specific problem this year.

The Ultra 3 was a real upgrade. It brought satellite messaging and 5G, a bigger display, and the sort of genuinely useful additions that justify the price for people who actually go beyond phone signal. It answered the criticism that the Ultra was a big Series watch with an orange button, and it was the upgrade Ultra owners had been waiting several years for.

Having done all that in one generation, Apple now has to follow it with a faster chip and, on the current reporting, not a great deal else. Satellite is done. 5G is done. The display got its jump. The Ultra 4 arrives as the sequel to the interesting one.

If you were waiting for the Ultra to become a genuinely different device rather than a more rugged one, the wait continues.

So What Should You Actually Do in September

Three straightforward cases, depending on what is on your wrist now.

Series 11 or Ultra 3 owner: keep it. A faster chip and vaguer health improvements is not an upgrade, it is a spec bump. You bought the generation that got the interesting features.

Series 8, 9 or Ultra 1 owner: this is a reasonable jump, but not because of anything announced this September. You are collecting three or four years of accumulated improvements at once, and the newer battery alone will feel like a different watch. Buy on the total gap, not the keynote.

Buying your first Apple Watch, or shopping on price: wait for the launch, then buy the outgoing model. A quiet year is exactly when last generation becomes the smart purchase, because the gap between old and new is at its narrowest while the discount is at its widest. The Series 11 has already dipped to $299 at Amazon once this year, and a September launch usually drags those prices down again. It is also worth checking Apple’s trade-in values before you commit, since they move around launch windows.

A Quiet Year Is Not Automatically a Bad One

It is easy to read all this as Apple losing interest in the Watch. That is probably the wrong conclusion.

The Apple Watch is a mature product that already does most of what people bought it for, and the remaining frontier is medical sensing, which is slow, expensive, heavily regulated and occasionally litigated. There is not much left to add that is both easy and worth having. A year of a faster chip and a better panel coming behind it is what maturity looks like, and the same pattern shows up across Apple’s line, including the longer-term wearables plans involving cameras.

The honest summary: September 2026 is a skip year for most existing owners, a decent buying window for everyone else, and the real Apple Watch story is 2027 and 2028. Just be aware that Apple has said something like that about blood sugar for fifteen years running.

Over to You

The watches are the quiet part of a very busy September. Is a faster chip enough to get you into a shop in September, or is this the year you sit out? And if you could have exactly one new sensor on your wrist, would you take blood sugar, or is there something you would rather Apple fixed first? Tell us below.