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 got three new models, and I gave two of them strongly positive reviews. (I haven’t tried the Ultra 3 yet, but it’s probably decent too, if a little bulky for my suburban tastes.) It just wasn’t an exciting year.

The Series 11, as excellent as it is, features very few changes from last year’s Series 10. And while the Apple Watch SE 3 offers a plethora of valuable upgrades, they’re new to the SE rather than to the whole line. It was a year of sensible consolidation, in other words, rather than headline fireworks.

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

A proper redesign at last

The theme of my Apple Watch reviews in 2025–not to mention my small contributions to our year-end awards article–was that the Series 11 is a terrific smartwatch, but the SE 3 is a better purchase. It simply isn’t worth spending an extra $150 on the full-fat model because the budget edition is more than good enough for most people’s needs.

Apple loves to maximise its profit margin and is fond of an upsell, so 2026’s 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. Yet another button? Can’t see it happening just yet. But other physical changes predicted a few years back for the once-rumored Apple Watch X, which included a thinner case, a larger battery, and a new magnetic band locking mechanism, may finally arrive next year. It might even be made of glass. With the inconvenient rise of the SE threatening Apple’s coffers, the timing couldn’t be better.

A better and much brighter screen

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

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

Apple Intelligence

Over the past year or so Apple has seemed determined to get its AI platform on every possible device–which is how we ended up with the deeply disappointing iPhone 16e situation. But there are a few exceptions. One is the baseline iPad; another is the entire Apple Watch lineup.

As we have reported, it’s extremely likely Apple makes the 12th-gen iPad AI-ready, and while the watch is less of an obvious slam-dunk, it makes a lot of sense as a portable AI assistant. And it would make a useful differentiator for the more expensive models.

On-board biometrics

I very rarely have to enter my Apple Watch’s passcode, because my iPhone 17 does such a good job as chaperone: looking at its Face ID scanner unlocks the watch, and it remains unlocked as soon as it remains on my wrist. (And as long as I still have a pulse, but let’s not think about that too much.) Apple is very good at these kinds of frictionless multi-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). Most obviously there are the times when you want to unlock it but your iPhone isn’t nearby; not to mention the long term, in which wearables will need to operate as standalone devices rather than accessories.

Being able to give 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, such as notifications from locked chats in WhatsApp.

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

Blood glucose tracking

Another Apple Watch generation means another round of speculation about new health sensors. What will we get in 2026? Prick-less blood glucose monitoring has been rumored for some time (we now understand research was underway back in the Steve Jobs era), and given that the project had reached the “proof of concept” phase in 2023, it may finally be ready for the big time next year.

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

A year off for the SE

This year, we got new models in all three Apple Watch lines: Series, SE, and Ultra. But this isn’t always the case. There was no SE in 2021 or 2023, and no SE or Ultra in 2024. The only constant is the Series.

With this 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 that will all change in fall 2026 if the Series 12 turns up with a bunch of new features (or a new design) while the SE remains stagnant. Apple used to do something similar with the baseline and Air editions of the iPad, which would come out at different times and make each other look less appealing.

Custom watch faces

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

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