2026 Apple Watch preview: 7 things I expect (and hope) to see next year

All things considered, 2025 was a good year for the Apple Watch: we received three new models and I gave two of them very positive reviews. (I haven’t tried the Ultra 3 yet, but it’s probably okay too, even if a little bulky for my suburban tastes.) It just wasn’t a exciting year.

The 11 series, as excellent as it is, has very few changes from last year’s 10 series. And while the Apple Watch SE 3 offers a plethora of valuable upgrades, they’re new to the SE rather than the entire line. In other words, it was a year of judicious consolidation rather than fireworks.

But all that could change in 2026. After more than a decade of same-old designs and slow iterative feature evolution, is Apple finally ready to announce big news for its smartwatches? We hope so. In this article, part prediction and part wishlist, we outline seven announcements and changes we can expect from the Apple Watch next year.

Finally a real overhaul

The theme of my Apple Watch reviews in 2025 – not to mention my small contributions to our end-of-year awards article – was that the Series 11 is a great smartwatch, but the SE 3 is a better buy. It’s just not worth spending an extra $150 for the full model, as the economy edition is more than enough to meet most people’s needs.

Apple likes to maximize its profit margin and loves upselling, so the 2026 mission will be to provide reasons to buy the Series 12. And the most obvious way to do that is to give it a flashy redesign for the first time in the product’s history.

Round screen? Unlikely. Another button? I don’t see that happening yet. But other physical changes predicted a few years ago for the Apple Watch It might even be made of glass. With the SE’s troublesome rise threatening Apple’s coffers, the timing couldn’t be better.

A better and much brighter screen

Those 2023 Apple Watch X rumors also included a microLED display, which still makes sense and would be a useful upgrade over the current OLED.

microLED means improved color fidelity, better power efficiency and, according to a concept presented by Samsung at CES in February, brightness levels pushing 4,000 nits. For comparison, the 11 series tops out at 2,000 nits and even the Ultra 3 has a maximum of 3,000.

Halyna Kubiv

Apple Intelligence

Over the past year, Apple has seemed determined to put its AI platform on every device possible – which is how we ended up with the deeply disappointing iPhone 16e situation. But there are some exceptions. One is the basic iPad; another is the entire Apple Watch line.

As we’ve reported, it’s extremely likely that Apple is making the 12th generation iPad AI-ready, and while the Watch is less obvious, it makes a lot of sense as a wearable AI assistant. And that would be a useful differentiator for the more expensive models.

Embedded biometrics

I very rarely have to enter my Apple Watch passcode, because my iPhone 17 does such a good job of chaperone: looking at its Face ID scanner unlocks the watch, and it stays unlocked as long as it stays on my wrist. (And while I still have a pulse, but let’s not think too much about it.) Apple is very good at this type of frictionless cross-device integration.

But there are still reasons why a fingerprint scanner would be a welcome upgrade for the Apple Watch in 2026 (most likely built into a side button, but potentially under the screen). It obviously happens that you want to unlock it but your iPhone is not nearby; not to mention the long term, in which wearables will need to function as standalone devices rather than accessories.

Being able to provide biometric authentication from the watch on a case-by-case basis could also be useful for Apple Pay and other financial uses, as well as health/fitness apps and private messaging, like locked chat notifications in WhatsApp.

This all might sound like an unlikely wishlist item, but internal code suggests that Apple is actually considering Touch ID on the Apple Watch.

Blood sugar monitoring

Another generation of Apple Watch means another round of speculation about new health sensors. What will we get in 2026? Rumors have been circulating about prick-free blood sugar monitoring for a while now (we now understand that research was underway during the Steve Jobs era), and given that the project reached the “proof of concept” phase in 2023, it might finally be ready for the big time next year.

This would be a game-changer for diabetic watch users, while providing useful data insights to anyone looking to improve their health and fitness.

David Price / Foundry

A year sabbatical for the SE

This year, we received new models in all three Apple Watch lines: Series, SE and Ultra. But this is not always the case. There was no SE in 2021 or 2023, nor an SE or Ultra in 2024. The only constant is the Series.

With that in mind, I think there’s good reason to expect the SE to take a year off in 2026. Right now, the SE 3 is the Apple Watch to go for. But everything will change in fall 2026 if the 12 series arrives with a bunch of new features (or a new design) while the SE stagnates. Apple was doing something similar with the base and Air editions of the iPad, which came out at different times and made themselves less appealing.

Custom Watch Faces

I’ll finish with an operating system upgrade dreamed up by Macworld contributor Mahmoud Itani: a customization tool to let you create your own watch face.

It always frustrates me when I find a face I like (Flux is a big favorite of mine) and then find that it doesn’t let me use all of the complications I rely on…or in Flux’s case, any complications at all. Being able to mix and match visual elements, fonts, and complications of different faces would allow users to create the watch experience they need.