Apple Watch Series 9 Review: Why the Watch Isn’t as Useful as It Could Be
It has a new double-tap feature and brighter screen, but latest model has same battery life the watches have had since 2015: 18 hours
4 min
If you asked me, “Should I upgrade my Apple Watch to the Series 9 this year?” I’d probably say no.
It’s a fine watch. It’s just not much better than the Series 8, which you can get cheaper, even refurbished right from Apple.
I have been testing the $399-and-up Series 9 for nearly a week. Available on Sept. 22, it includes a few upgrades, including a one-handed, double-tap gesture and a brighter screen. Apple says one version of it—the aluminum case with Sport Loop band—is carbon neutral.
Many things, though, remain unchanged from last year’s, including the health sensors and design. I’m most grumpy about the battery life. Back in 2015, Apple promised 18 hours. Today, Apple promises…18 hours. Eight years and a dozen models later, we still need to charge these watches daily.
The Apple Watch is the bestselling smartwatch in the world, but battery life is where competitors such as Garmin still have an edge. It’s what holds the Apple Watch back from true all-day/all-night/all-weekend usefulness.
Double tap and new features
The improvements to the Series 9 are internal, enabling new features that are nice-to-haves. There are no game-changers.
Double tap: The new watch senses when you pinch your thumb and index finger twice, in quick succession. The gesture triggers an action that varies depending on what you’re doing. If you’re playing a song, you can double-tap to pause or skip. For incoming texts, it starts a reply with voice dictation. For calls, it picks up the phone. For timers, it dismisses the alert.
Double tap will come in an update rolling out next month. It’s useful for one-handed operation, while you’re holding on to a subway pole or cup of coffee. It also works while you’re wearing gloves.
A similar accessibility feature called AssistiveTouch is available on Series 4 models and newer. You can even double-pinch to dismiss notifications. In my tests, AssistiveTouch wasn’t always as responsive as double-tapping on the Series 9, but if you already have an Apple Watch, it’s worth enabling.
Offline Siri: Apple’s voice assistant can now process some queries faster and more accurately, because it doesn’t need to send the request to the server over Wi-Fi or cellular. You can set timers—even multiple timers in the WatchOS 10—almost instantaneously.
Brighter screen: The display goes up to 2,000 nits, up from 1,000 nits last year. If you don’t speak nits, that translates to a screen that’s easier to see outdoors on a sunny day. Its dimmest setting is also lower, way down to one nit. The Apple Watch adjusts screen brightness automatically based on ambient light, so the brighter screen isn’t noticeable in most settings.
Precision iPhone finding: I use my Apple Watch’s Find My iPhone ping basically every day, so I thought I’d like precision finding. When you’re within about 30 feet of the iPhone, you can see its distance and direction—similar to an AirTag. It’s nice for those who might be unable to hear the audible ping triggered by older models, but that never failed me. And this trick only works with an iPhone 15 model.
Stalled battery life
In its quest to make the smartwatch a jack-of-all-trades wearable with a high-resolution, multitouch screen, Apple has sacrificed battery life. The new S9 processor is 25% more power efficient than last year’s model. But over the years, the company has added more sensors, brighter screens and other energy-sucking elements.
During the watch’s recent unveiling, Deidre Caldbeck, the director of Apple Watch product marketing, highlighted the company priority: “This powerful custom silicon is what allows us to maintain all-day 18-hour battery life while adding new features and systemwide improvements.”
Garmin wearables, meanwhile, have lower-resolution displays that can last days. Some models have solar panels embedded in their watch faces, and can last weeks. It’s something I’m painfully reminded of every time I forget my Apple Watch charger on a weekend trip. Cue the gloating by my Garmin-wearing husband, who never brings his charger.
Apple often touts the watch’s health-tracking capabilities in marketing materials. For this to work, though, it has to be on your wrist—even at night, while you sleep. That’s tough when it needs to be charged once a day.
Charging wouldn’t be as problematic if the Apple Watch didn’t need its own proprietary puck to power up. (Garmin’s new Vivomove Trend is one of the first to work with standard Qi wireless charging.)
I’m not saying Apple Watches are useless without default multi day battery life. I wear mine so often that I have a squircle-shaped tan on my wrist. But a battery-life quantum leap is needed.
That could be coming next year. The Apple Watch was announced 10 years ago next fall, and that anniversary could mean a big redesign. According to a Bloomberg report, a new band system could make room in the watch’s case for more sensors—or, I hope, a bigger battery—and a switch to a more energy-efficient microLED display could lead to power gains.
How to get longer battery life
If you want the longest battery life right now, there’s the $799 Apple Watch Ultra. It lasts a day and a half by default. But even the new, modestly upgraded model is a bulky chunkster, especially on smaller wrists. Anyone else looking for a big Apple Watch change should wait until 2024.
Meanwhile, you can temporarily double the battery life by taking away power-draining features.
• Enable low-power mode: You can quickly enable low-power mode for set periods. Press the side button to open the Control Center, then tap on the battery percentage and scroll down.
Just beware: It does disable some of the lifesaving heart-rate notifications and the power-hungry always-on display. When double tap is available, low-power mode will also disable that gesture.
• Reduce workout sensor readings: Go to Settings > Workout, then tap Fewer GPS and Heart Rate Readings to enable. When in low-power mode, the watch won’t capture GPS or heart-rate data as frequently during outdoor workouts, further extending battery life.
You can also disable some functions. I managed to squeeze 48 hours out of the Series 9 by turning off the most battery-intensive ones, but it’s a trade-off:
• Double tap: When the feature rolls out to Series 9 models next month, you can turn it off. Go to Settings > Gestures > Double Tap to disable.
• Always-on display: Go to Settings > Display & Brightness. Tap Always On to disable.
• Background app refresh: Go to Settings > General. Scroll down to Background App Refresh to disable entirely or turn off for certain apps.
• Reduce display brightness: In Settings > Display & Brightness, you can adjust the default setting.
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OpenAI has shelved the planned launch of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal tests raised concerns about deception and agents acting beyond user authorization, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company says it will investigate the issues and strengthen safety measures before releasing future models.
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OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.
The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.
The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.
The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.
Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.
Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.
“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”
While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.
The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.
In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.
OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.
Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.
Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.
Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.
GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.
“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”
While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.
OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.
AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.
In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.
Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”
An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”
“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.
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