Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 Officially Announced

Apple today also announced the new Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2, and there’s also a minor refreshed Apple Watch SE.

Apple Watch Series 9

The Apple Watch Series 9 features the new S9 SiP, which the company claims most powerful watch chip ever that boasts a 30% faster GPU and a new 4-core NPU. The new chip allows the watch to maintain an all-day 18-hour battery life, as well as speed up the OS with faster animations.

For the first time on the Apple Watch, Siri requests can be processed on the device. For requests that do not require information from the internet, such as starting a workout or setting a timer, Siri does not rely on Wi-Fi or cellular networks, resulting in quicker and more reliable responses. The powerful Neural Engine also makes dictation up to 25% more accurate than the Apple Watch Series 8.

The watch also now features a new double-tap gesture, which lets you easily control the watch using just one hand and without touching the display. You can tap the index finger and thumb of your watch hand together twice to quickly and conveniently perform many of the most common actions on the watch. Double tap allows you to play/pause music, snooze alarms, scroll through widgets, and pick up or hang up calls.

Available in 41mm and 45mm sizes with Bluetooth and cellular trims, the Series 9 comes with a display with up to 2,000 nits of peak brightness and down to 1 nit if you don’t want to blind yourself at night.

The watch also comes with the new Ultra Wideband (UWB) chip to enable Precision Finding for the iPhone 15 family, which has the same chip. Precision Finding provides distance and direction, as well as visual, haptic, and audio guidance to a misplaced iPhone, even if it is in a different room.

The Apple Watch Series 9 runs on watchOS 10 and comes in aluminum and stainless steel casings. Color options include Starlight, Midnight, Silver, (PRODUCT)RED, and Pink for the aluminum model. The Stainless Steel version gets Silver, Gold, and Graphite options. The Apple Watch Series 9 starts at RM1,899, and Apple Watch SE starts at RM1,199.

Apple Watch Ultra 2

The Apple Watch Ultra 2 looks pretty similar to its predecessor. It now gets the same new Apple S9 SiP and Double Tap gesture controls alongside the new UWB chip for improved location tracking. It is still available in 49mm with a 1.92-inch LTPO OLED display that now can crank up to 3,000 nits of peak brightness.

The battery life for the new watch is still rated at 36 hours, but it can now extend to 72 hours in low-power mode. Night mode can now use the ambient light sensor to activate automatically.

Apple has also designed a new watch face — Modular Ultra, which takes advantage of the large display, using the outermost edge to present real-time data, including seconds, altitude, or depth. It offers the most complications of any Apple digital watch face to customize for sports, outdoor adventures, and ocean and water activities.

It also runs on watchOS 10 and you can now connect with cycling peripherals like power meter pedals via Bluetooth for accurate results. The Apple Watch Ultra 2 starts at RM3,799, but the release date in Malaysia is still unknown at the moment.

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