Apple Watch Series 12: Worthwhile upgrade, looking forward to Audio Intelligence

I’ve had the Apple Watch Series 12 on my wrist for nearly a week, and I’ve grown very accustomed to Apple’s latest smartwatch. I’ve been wearing it while I go for walks, sleep, and play badminton, and the watch has done a good job of accurately monitoring my activities.

Apple has paired the watch with a new Health Sensing System with a third-gen heart sensor, an always-on optical heart sensor, a blood oxygen sensor and a temperature sensor. This means you should get very accurate vitals from your watch.

Apple detailed a study with more than 1,400 participants wearing ECG-based chest straps to see how well the updated optical heart rate sensing system compares to the likes of the Pixel Watch 4, Galaxy Watch 8, Oura Ring 5, and Garmin Forerunner 970. According to the study, the Apple Watch demonstrated a statistically significant higher level of accuracy versus the other devices for both overall workouts and overall daily living.

I don’t have all of these devices or an ECG-based chest strap to test this out myself, but Apple seems to be saying this with its whole chest: “Apple Watch offers users the most accurate heart rate sensing among wearable devices evaluated in this study.” I’m going to believe them. Although it’s worth mentioning that both Google and Samsung have released new devices since the conclusion of the study, neither company has made any significant changes to their heart rate sensors, so Apple’s should still have the edge.

But it makes sense that Apple’s does such a good job; compared with its predecessor, you can see a huge difference between the two when you flip the watch over to the back. There are a lot more sensors and lights, and it seems like an impressive makeover, even if you don’t know all the technical nuances behind it.

Still, I’m not typically a guy who’s constantly checking his heart rate, besides seeing how high my heart rate gets when challenging a difficult boss in a game and making sure I don’t have a heart attack when I’m playing badminton, so a lot of this health stuff isn’t for me.

How I use my Apple Watch

For the most part, I’ve been using the Series 12 to check my notifications, answer calls, monitor my sleep, and honestly, use Siri a lot.

For sleep monitoring, it’s been giving me pretty good scores, which feels odd because I typically have horrible scores. However, I’ve been going to bed earlier, usually before 1 a.m. versus my typical 2 a.m. According to Apple’s website, sleep quality is influenced by factors such as bedtime consistency, sleep duration, and how often I wake up throughout the night. So, since I’m going to bed earlier and not waking up as much (I used to wake up a lot throughout the night), I’m getting better sleep scores. One night, I had a sleep score of 74, but I woke up several times throughout the night in anticipation of an earlier wake-up, so it makes sense my score dropped.

I have sleep apnea, but I haven’t been using my CPAP machine over the past week, and I expected my watch to take note of that, but I didn’t realize that there’s a separate sleep apnea feature you need to turn on. It specifically says it should be used if you haven’t been diagnosed with sleep apnea, so if you have it, don’t follow my lead. It hasn’t picked up my sleep apnea yet, but I only just turned on the feature last night, and it takes a few days to start working. Still, this feature isn’t new, and it even helped MobileSyrup’s gaming editor Brad Shankar diagnose his sleep apnea back on the Series 10, so we know it works.

I’ve been really looking forward to seeing the ‘Readiness’ app, which takes into account factors like sleep, overnight vitals, your height, weight and age, and both your activity from today and recent history. This includes active calories, workout effort ratings, and training load data. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the chance to use the Readiness app on the Series 12 as it takes seven nights to develop a baseline, and I’ve only been wearing the watch for six nights so far.

But I’m curious to see how well the Apple Watch can understand how ready I am for the day. Especially considering I never feel ready to embrace the day.

I mentioned Siri earlier, as I’ve been using the AI a lot with the watch for things that I would typically ask of my phone, but it’s just easier on the smartwatch.

Because of Apple Intelligence, I’m able to ask my watch, “What should I wear for the day?” and it’ll make suggestions based on the weather and my location. When my partner asked when I was leaving for my next trip, I asked my watch, and it surfaced my trip details from my email. I was even able to ask about the name of the bird I saw in the pond at the park today, and it went through my photos in the past day to tell me it was a little blue heron. But AI isn’t perfect. I also asked it what other animals I saw at the park, and it told me a lion and a giraffe. High Park has a zoo, but its animals aren’t that exotic. I think it mistook some of the photos for these African animals instead, but it was pretty wrong.

Still, I liked having Apple Intelligence easily accessible on my wrist. Especially when I go into my closet and forget to bring my phone with me.

Audio Intelligence incoming

I like the design of the Apple Watch Series 12. I’m still not sure that I love the squircle screen, but it looks great, and the 46mm is deceivingly small. I feel like bigger watches tend to be more gaudy, but that’s not the case with the Watch Series 12. However, the Apple Watch Ultra 4, which I’ve also been testing for the past six days, is too big.

I didn’t think I’d like the new ‘Bronze’ colour, but seeing it in person, it’s very nice. I chose that one with older 45mm blue straps, as I wasn’t a huge fan of the colour that came with it. I’m happy to see that older straps work with this Watch Series 12.

I’m also looking forward to trying out Audio Intelligence. It launches in Beta later this year, and it wasn’t available for me to review. I’m someone who wishes the world had subtitles, so Live Rewind will be pretty useful for me. With Live Rewind, Series 12 will be able to transcribe the last 15 seconds of what was said. However, this also seems like a major issue in privacy, and I don’t blame anyone for being concerned.

Apple is using its S11 chip on the Apple Watch to process audio privately, so that not even Apple can access it. For Live Rewind, it works by a continuous flow of audio entering your Apple Watch’s S11 chip, with old audio continuously being replaced with new audio. When you double-press the Digital Crown, the last 15 seconds of buffered audio is sent from your Apple Watch to your iPhone; your phone converts audio to text, the raw audio is deleted, and your Apple Watch shows the text. This was enough to get rid of my privacy concerns, but Apple explains it more thoroughly on its website and details how Audio Intelligence works with all of its features. Still, I won’t be able to say how good Live Rewind is, or the other three Audio Intelligence features — Siri Recap, Music Recognition with Shazam, and Sound Recognition on Apple Watch aren’t available until Audio Intelligence comes out in beta later this year.

Time to upgrade

The Apple Watch Series 12 has a solid battery life. Given I have every health sensor turned on all the time, plus I’m constantly bothering my watch with Siri questions, and I use it as an Apple TV remote. It takes over two days to die and charges surprisingly quickly, with it going from 10 per cent to 100 in less than an hour. The Watch Ultra 4 has an even better battery life at over three days with a charge. While it’s not the best battery ever on a smartwatch, the combination of quick charging and the more than two-day battery life means I’m pretty much wearing the watch all the time, besides when I’m showering. The Series 12 is thinner than the Series 9, so I think it made it a lot easier to wear all the time.

As someone who used a Series 9 before this, the Series 12 would definitely be a worthwhile upgrade for me. The Watch Series 12 has a solid battery, an upgraded Health sensing unit that will likely be around for a while (considering the last one has been around for six years), and Apple Intelligence, so I can talk to Siri in natural language.

The Apple Watch Series 12 starts at $549 and is available on September 18. And if you’re someone who goes hiking, deep diving and/or needs a more rugged and bigger watch, the Watch Ultra 4 starts at $1,099. I’m definitely someone who wouldn’t need the Watch Ultra 4, but I’m liking the capable Series 12. I’d consider the next Apple Watch SE as well, but if it doesn’t have Audio Intelligence, count me out. I’m looking forward to trying and writing about Audio Intelligence when it comes out in beta later this year. I’ll also report any new findings with the Readiness Score app as well.