September 16, 2024
UPDATE
WatchOS 11 is currently available in the market.
Introducing a suite of innovative features: sleep apnea notifications on Vitals, coaching insights to optimize workout loads, further customization options for Exercise rings, an enhanced personalized Sensible Stack, and more.
Apple has unveiled its latest iteration of the world’s most popular smartwatch, introducing highly effective health and wellness insights, alongside greater personalization, intelligent features, and ways to stay connected.
Apple Watch’s latest feature enables users to monitor and potentially diagnose signs of sleep apnea.1 The Vitals app empowers users to swiftly check-in on crucial health metrics with a glance, gaining valuable insights into their overall wellness.2 The ability to quantify coaching load empowers customers to make informed decisions regarding their healthcare and performance, while exercise rings offer enhanced customization options. The Apple Watch and Health app on iPhone and iPad offer additional support for users who are expecting.
Apple introduces advanced features in iOS, including the Sensible Stacks and Picture Pages, which utilize AI-driven intelligence to provide a more personalized experience, as well as enhanced capabilities for Examine In, the Translate app, and new functionality for the double-tap gesture on Apple Watch, designed to offer greater comfort and convenience for staying connected.
The latest Apple Watch Series – Apple Watch Collection 9, Apple Watch Collection 10, and Apple Watch Ultra – introduce a feature designed to help identify symptoms of sleep apnea. Apple Watch employs its accelerometer to monitor subtle wrist movements during sleep that correlate with irregularities in normal breathing patterns, utilizing a novel metric called Respiratory Disturbances. Within the Wellbeing app, customers can access their historical Respiratory Disturbance data, categorized as either elevated or not elevated, across customizable timeframes of up to one year, with options for daily, monthly, and yearly views.
The new sleep apnea detection algorithm processes respiratory data every 30 days to inform users of potential sleep apnea indicators, enabling timely notifications on their Apple Watch. The notification provides a specified timeframe during which potential sleep apnea may have occurred, along with educational resources highlighting the importance of seeking treatment, accompanied by a comprehensive PDF containing three months’ worth of respiratory disturbance data, detailed notification information, and additional reference materials to facilitate informed discussions with healthcare providers.
The sleep apnea monitoring feature leverages the advanced processing capabilities of Samsung’s S9 and S10 System-in-Package (SiP), in conjunction with scientifically proven algorithms to deliver accurate results. Developed through superior machine learning and training data derived from hundreds of nights of clinically-validated sleep apnea recordings, this characteristic was established in conjunction with the largest study ever conducted to secure FDA clearance for a sleep apnea device. Following FDA 510(k) clearance and additional global health authority approvals, sleep apnea alerts are now available in more than 150 countries and regions worldwide, encompassing major markets such as the United States, European Union, and Japan.
The newly launched Vitals app empowers users to track their daily health status and instantly identify unusual nighttime health metrics, enabling them to quickly detect deviations from their norm. Customers receive notifications when multiple metrics stray from their norm, accompanied by an explanatory message highlighting potential connections between the anomalies and factors such as changes in elevation, alcohol consumption, or health status.
Using data gleaned from Apple’s Heart and Motion Studies, Vitals leverages an algorithm designed to elucidate the intricate connections between cardiovascular health and physical activity, thereby providing valuable insights into out-of-range classifications and notifications.
The coaching load concept assesses the effects of exercise intensity and duration on a person’s physical appearance, a strategy commonly employed by professional athletes and trainers to optimize performance and streamline their approach. The Apple Watch provides users with unique data-driven insights into their training load, empowering them to make informed decisions about their daily routine, especially when preparing for a significant event or competition.
Apple Watch will introduce a 28-day coaching program, leveraging a proprietary algorithm that takes into account both the duration and intensity of users’ workouts during this timeframe, as measured by a newly developed effort rating system. The effort scores are readily available following each exercise, providing insight into the level of difficulty on a scale of 1 to 10, while well-regarded cardio-based exercises employ a novel algorithm in conjunction with multiple metrics to automatically generate an estimated effort rating, which users can subsequently refine manually. Without providing a default estimated effort for exercises that don’t have one, such as strength training, users can still input their perceived exertion level at the end of each workout.
In the Exercise and Vitals applications, users can now visualize their coaching intensity over a 7-day period in relation to their overall 28-day coaching load, with labels indicating whether it’s below, under, regular, above, or significantly above average. This insight provides a tangible understanding of whether current physical stress is escalating, remaining consistent, or subsiding, enabling individuals to adjust their training for optimal results? The Health app on iPhone provides users with further information about the possible impact on their well-being if they continue training at their current intensity level, including potential changes in health and risk of injury?
With watchOS 11, exercise rings have become even more personalized, offering users greater flexibility in tracking their physical activity. Customizable exercise ring targets are now available, allowing for a tailored approach based on the specific day of the week, ensuring a seamless fit with customers’ busy schedules. Customers can now take a break from work at any point during their coaching period, choosing to pause their rings for a day, week, month, or longer – without disrupting their award-winning streaks. The Apple Health app allows users to personalize their Abstract tab.
Apple’s latest watchOS 11, iOS 18, and iPadOS 18 updates offer enhanced support for customers tracking their pregnancy in the Health app, providing a more comprehensive view of physical and emotional changes throughout this pivotal period. The Cycle Monitoring app on Apple Watch tracks a user’s gestational age and allows them to record symptoms they experience regularly during pregnancy. In the Wellbeing app, expectant mothers may receive prompts to review settings like their elevated heart rate notification threshold, as heart rate typically increases during pregnancy.
The Sensible Stack streamlines access to essential information from any watch face, now empowered by intelligent algorithms that suggest and add relevant widgets based on time, date, location, daily routines, and more – making it seamless for users to find what they need on Apple Watch whenever required. New widgets, including Pictures, Distance, Shazam, and others, are now available. Interactive widgets allow users to engage directly with apps from the Smart Stack, while Live Actions is now accessible on Apple Watch via the Smart Stack.
The Walkie-Talkie feature on Apple Watch allows for seamless communication, accessible directly from the Exercise app or Messages. With our new system, users can initiate an examine-in process at any time during their workout, be it a morning jog or evening gym session, allowing a friend or family member to keep tabs on their progress until completion.
The Translate app has arrived on Apple Watch, harnessing the power of machine learning to facilitate seamless speech recognition and rapid translations that users can access directly on their wrist. When users travel to areas where the primary language is different from their Apple Watch setting, the Translate app widget on the Sensible Stack may occasionally crash or cease functioning properly?
With the introduction of the double-faucet gesture, users can seamlessly scroll through any app using just their Apple Watch, streamlining collaboration and enhancing overall usability with a single-handed approach.
WatchOS 11 ushers in a trio of innovative watch faces that revolutionize your wrist-based experience.
- Today’s AI-powered face can empower consumers in selecting the most impressive portrait options by leveraging machine learning to provide recommendations grounded in aesthetics, composition, and even facial expressions. A tailored algorithm identifies the optimal structure by balancing the topic’s placement across the content and generating depth, while Picture faces now offer a Dynamic mode that displays a fresh image every time a user lifts their wrist.
- The phone’s face boasts an audacious graphical display that dramatically transforms the screen every second, fully leveraging its expansive display and 1Hz refresh rate.
- The watch features a unique, shimmering dial that responds with understated nuance to user interactions.
Apple Watch’s latest update, watchOS 11, now offers a Tides app to help customers effectively plan and enjoy their open water activities while remaining mindful of changing tidal conditions. Customers can access seven days of forecasted tidal information for coastlines and surf spots worldwide, including details on high and low tides, rising and falling tides, tidal peak times, direction, and sunrise/sunset schedules, all displayed graphically against a timeline. Customers can easily view nearby seashores on a convenient map, with the added ability to access current tide information for their favorite spots or the nearest beaches at a glance.
- Extracurricular activities such as soccer, American football, Australian rules football, field hockey, lacrosse, downhill snowboarding, cross-country skiing, freestyle skiing, golf, and outdoor rowing now offer distance tracking capabilities. Route maps are also available for additional exercise types.
- Pool swimmers can now leverage customized exercises, while a novel Up Subsequent feature enables a clear view of the current and forthcoming intervals in the revamped Exercise tracking system.
- gives hikes throughout U.S. Across the country’s scenic nationwide parks, visitors can craft their unique adventure experiences by creating personalized hiking and walking routes directly within the Apple Maps app on their iPhone. These routes can be saved to your Apple Watch and accessed offline, featuring turn-by-turn directions, without requiring your iPhone nearby.
- Powered by Apple Intelligence, this feature allows seamless forwarding of messages from select iPhone models – specifically, the iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, iPhone 16 Pro Max, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max – to Apple Watch for convenient and timely responses.3
- The newly released tickets in our expertise platform provide additional details, such as the opening time of a venue, accompanied by a Live Exercise feature that displays crucial information like seat assignments at the top of the Smart Stack.4
- When using AirDrop, customers can seamlessly transfer and receive Apple Cash simply by bringing their Apple Watch into proximity with another Apple Watch or iPhone.5
Privacy is paramount in the design and development of all Apple products. When consumers secure their devices using passcodes, Contact IDs, or Face IDs, their entire Wellbeing app data is encrypted, except for Medical ID information. All wellbeing data stored in iCloud is consistently secured both in transit and on Apple’s servers. With the default use of two-factor authentication and a passcode on iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS, Wellbeing app data synced to iCloud enjoys robust encryption, ensuring that only the intended user can access it, as Apple lacks the decryption key and therefore cannot read or intercept the information.
Apple’s watchOS 11 is currently available for Apple Watch Series 6 and later models, with compatibility requiring an iPhone X or later running iOS 14 or later. Options aren’t universally available on all devices nor in every region.
- Notifications for sleep apnea currently exist globally, spanning over 150 countries and regions worldwide, including the United States, European Union, and Japan. The following properties are currently available: This feature is available on the Apple Watch Series 9, Apple Watch Series 10, and Apple Watch Ultra 2.
The tool aims to identify indicators of moderate to severe sleep apnea in adults aged 18 and above without a prior diagnosis of sleep apnea.
- The Vitals app is exclusively designed for general wellness purposes, with no intention of being used as a substitute for medical treatment or diagnosis.
- Apple’s iIntelligence can be replaced by a free software program, offering an alternative solution for users. Apple’s initial Intelligence features will debut in beta form next month as part of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1, with further enhancements to be rolled out in subsequent months.
The feature will likely be available on iPhone 16 models, including the iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Professional, and iPhone 16 Professional Max, as well as iPhone 15 Professional and iPhone 15 Professional Max devices. It will also be compatible with iPads and Macs equipped with M1 chip or later, assuming a U.S. system language setting and Siri language is enabled. English. Later this year, Apple Intelligent Assistant will introduce support for localized English dialects in five regions: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. As part of its strategic expansion plan, Apple Intelligence aims to augment its presence by introducing the platform on multiple new territories over the ensuing 12 months, including Chinese, English (India), English (Singapore), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Vietnamese, and additional languages.
- Tickets for Apple Pay and other mobile payment methods can be enhanced with special features and offers from participating merchants.
- Apple Money providers are powered by Green Dot Bank. Member FDIC. Apple Funds Companies LLC, a subsidiary of Apple Inc., serves as a service provider to Green Dot Bank in connection with Apple Cash accounts. Neither Apple Inc. Nor does Apple Funds Companies LLC serve as a financial institution. What do you want to learn more about? Exclusively found in the United States on eligible gadgets.
Press Contacts
Nikki Rothberg
Apple
Clare Varellas
Apple
Apple Media Helpline