Which Apple Watch?

Find out which one of Apple' wearables is right for you.

Author

Leander Kahney
April 28, 2025

I wear an Apple Watch Ultra, but it’s overkill for me: I barely use half its functions.

I do like the way it looks, and its big bright screen. The long battery life is also a great feature.

But I’d be just as happy with an Apple Watch Series 10 or earlier. And in fact, I regularly use my old Series 8 if I forget to charge the Ultra. (I swap them in and out of my bedside charger.)

I use my Apple Watch to log workouts, but the most important things to me are its health and safety functions. After working on a roundup of all the ways Apple Watch has saved people’s lives, I appreciate more than ever the device’s role as an ever-vigilant guardian on your wrist.

Which means I likely won’t be buying an entry-level Apple Watch SE anytime soon. The SE models offer only basic heart-monitoring functions. However, for lots of people, this isn’t a deal-breaker. I bought SE models for both my mother and my father-in-law, and they’re both happy as Larry. More expensive models with more functions would be lost on them, tbh.

And then there’s the blood oxygen monitoring, which Apple removed from recent models because of a patent dispute. But the function remains intact on older Apple Watch models, which go for a song on Amazon.

There are many factors to consider when buying a new Apple Watch (or an older one). We hacked our way through the thicket of buying choices with our Apple Watch buying guide. Hopefully, it’ll make our readers’ purchasing decisions easier.

Also in today’s newsletter:

  • What madness is this? Connecting your iPhone to Ethernet? Why would you want to do that? Our writer Ed Hardy lays out some good use cases, and it’s a lot easier than you’d think.

  • I really wanted to like Jon Hamm’s Your Friends & Neighbors — the Apple TV+ show has a great premise, after all. But alas, the characters really started getting on my nerves, and I fast-forwarded through the latest episodes just to get to the burglary parts. Seems I’m alone, though: The show continues to be a big hit.

  • Apple dropped a new trailer for Indiana Jones knockoff Fountain of Youth, and it looks pretty fun.

  • Wow, the new M4 MacBook Air is on sale for just $849. That’s a crazy-good deal for what’s probably the best value computer available right now.

— Leander Kahney, EIC.

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One more thing ...

❝

I saw a videotape that we weren't supposed to see. It was prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. By watching the tape, we discovered that, at least as of a few years ago, every tactical nuclear weapon in Europe manned by U.S. personnel was targeted by an Apple II computer. Now, we didn't sell computers to the military; they went out and bought them at a dealer's, I guess. But it didn't make us feel good to know that our computers were being used to target nuclear weapons in Europe. The only bright side of it was that at least they weren't [Radio Shack] TRS-80s! Thank God for that.

— Steve Jobs, 1985.

Today’s poll

Which Apple Watch do you own?

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Results from last Friday’s poll: Do you like Apple's AI image styles?

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