Any other year — Any. Other. Year. And we’d only be a couple weeks away from Tim Cook taking the stage in Cupertino, California and good morning-us-all into the Apple Watch Series 6 announcement.
This year, though, this… Buffy Wish Fringe Mirrorverse of darkest timelines year, Apple’s next-generation wearable could come… any time.
Design
It feels like every year there’s a rumor the Apple Watch is going to go round, like right round, like a record round, Stop it!
And I get it. I totally get it. When people think of watches they tend to think of round. And they want an Apple Watch that’s every bit that round.
Even though the Apple Watch is really no more of a watch than the iPhone is phone. And absolutely no one seems to want an iPhone that’s shaped like an old-school phone. Like a traditional Ma Bell banana shaped phone. Any more than they want a car that’s shaped like a horse.
Apple means it to be a wrist computer, just like they mean the iPhone to be a hand computer and the iMac to be a desk computer and none of those are round. Even though a porthole-shaped iMac would be hella cool.
Personally, I’d love to see all of those things, because I’d love to see the kinds of interfaces Apple could come up with for all those kinds of things, even if they’re more inforgraphical and less computational, because rects favor frames and texts while rounds… dials and pie charts. But, seriously, because, Samsung and some and Android Wear watch makers have done some interesting stuff there.
Maybe also a 48mm Series 6 Max, for people who like their watches less stealth and more Schwarzenegger.
But fanfic aside, the Apple Watch is still riding high off it’s Series 4 redesign from ought-18, and I expect it to keep riding off of it for another year or two.
But let me know what you want to see in the comments below.
Display
The biggest display rumor for the Apple Watch Series 6 is that it could be switching from its current OLED to MicroLED.
Now, the current OLED on the Apple Watch is actually pretty good as OLED goes. It even uses good old RGB stripe for its sub-pixel arrangement, like LCD displays, and not the compromise that is the PenTile arrangements on bigger, phone-sized displays.
MicroLED, though, has most of the advantages of OLED without requiring anywhere nearly as many mitigations. It’s even self-illuminating, like OLED, and unlike the confusingly similarly named miniLED.
If executed right, it should give us the best of all display worlds. Deep, detailed blacks, bright but not blown out highlights, high contrast ratio, consistent color and brightness, with no burn-in or shifting or flickering, or smearing, or any of that.
More recent rumors suggest this might be more of a Series 7 thing than Series 6 thing, but I really can’t wait to see it. Especially if it moves from Apple Watch to iPhone the way OLED did.
Buttons
Another rumor making the rounds — not the rounds like.. never mind — is that Apple might do to the side button on the Watch what they did to the Home button on the iPhone.
No, not delete it like the X… make it virtual like the 7.
See, as much as humans love us some knobby, gnarly, clickity, clackety, oh-so-satifyingly physical button action, companies seem to just hate the mechanical failure rates that come with them.
In other words, to reduce the amount of repairs they need to make and increase the quality of the water resistance they can offer — in this case reportedly improve the swim-proofing even beyond the current 50m. Dive proofing, maybe? Swimming-with-shark proofing? I mean, what could be next?
We’ve already seen Apple make the Digital Crown haptic and take the side button from far-out to basically flush. So, the next step could be to just take it out and hit flush.
Make it Taptic, take advantage of proprioceptive trickery, the fact that how our brains process information basically makes physics a lie, and fool us into thinking a horizontal haptic vibration is so kind of real vertical click.
You know, like they used to do with force touch on the display before just taking that away this year with watchOS 7. And if you missed that, make sure you hit the subscribe button and bell, so you don’t miss anything else, and so that we can hang in the comments when new videos go live.
Anyway, it may not be this year but it sure seems like it’ll be one of these years.
Sensors
Glucose monitoring on the Apple Watch is something so many people want so badly, including Apple. And with good reason. But Apple just keeps buying companies that claim to be close to doing it only to discover each on is basically, realistically, just as far away as the last.
Closer than blood sugar is probably blood pressure. Samsung is already offering a limited version of it on their latest watch. Apple has a patent, because Apple has a patent on everything, including having patents, but whether or not they have a feature they think is mature enough to roll out, and a plan to roll it out internationally like they’ve been doing with ECG, we’ll just have to wait and see.
Blood oxygen, or a pulse oximeter, might be the most likely for this year and the Series 6. The Apple Watch could use it for alerts, like the current low heart rate alerts. That way if the oxygen level in your blood dipped too low during exercise or during sleep or maybe even because of COVID-19, it could let you know and you could let your doctor know.
And it could be one more way for the Apple Watch to save lives. And yeah, let’s all just hit the like button for that and see how high it can get.
Health
Apple introduced sleep tracking with watchOS 7. I’ve already done a full preview on that, so make sure you check it out, link in the description.
Apple Watch Series 6 could make it even better. Specifically, with a faster but also more efficient S6 system-in-package, aka computer-on-a-chip.
Also, a larger battery so there’d be a higher chance you could make it to bedtime with enough juice to actually do the tracking, or just to give you more time to charge on the other side of the sleep tracking. Either way, more battery here is definitely better.
It’d also be terrific if there was a better low-power mode for when sleep tracking was one, better even than the current always-on-display style mode, and a faster charging method for when you wake up and need to top up. Apple Watch charging has pretty much been static since launch, which is good because small batteries and big heat don’t exactly mix, but any extra efficiency Apple could safely, non-destructively, add here would be greatly appreciated.
The other rumored health features are mental health features, which would be legit terrific for the Apple Watch to start addressing.
So far, it sounds like it might be able to use the sensors to figure out if you’re having a panic attack rather than a heart attack, and then let you know, offer you breathing or guided meditations to try and work through it, or if that’s not enough, call emergency services and your emergency contact.
It’s just such an important area, if you have any other ideas for features you’d like to see here, let me know in the comments.
Launch
Jon Prosser has recently rumored the Newsroom drop date for the Apple Watch Series 6 to be a right-on-time week-of-september 7, so as soon as a… fortnite from now. What… ?
The EEC, the Eurasian economic commission has also registered 8 new models, likely 4 GPS, 4 LTE. Which is also a strong indicator they’re coming in the next few weeks or so.
And, of course, there’ll probably be new finishes and bands. Because there are always new finishes and bands. Last year we got the return of ceramic and the introduction of titanium. I honestly don’t know what that leaves for this year. Maybe the return of gray ceramic or gold steel? The introduction of space black ceramic or platinum steel?
For bands, at the very least, we’ll get the introduction of new fall colors, including for the Nike+ and Hermes lines.