The Apple Watch 6 (or Apple Watch Series 6) is the latest watch from the company alongside the Apple Watch SE that launched at the same time. With an unrivaled user experience, fantastic apps, and potentially lifesaving health and fitness features, the Apple Watch Series 6 is the best smartwatch you can buy. Here is a detailed Apple Watch Series 6 review you should read to consider.
Contents
Apple Watch Series 6 Review
1. Price and availability
The Apple Watch 6 starts at $399 for the GPS-only model and $499 for the GPS + Cellular variation. The larger 44mm model, meanwhile, will start at $429.
One thing to note, the Apple Watch 6 will not ship with a power adapter as part of the company’s new sustainability initiatives.
2. Design
Whichever style of Apple Watch Series 6 you buy, its form and function remain the same. You get a rounded rectangle with a smooth glass top that gently curves into its case. On the right are the color-ringed Digital Crown and side button; at the back, you’ll find a completely redesigned crystal containing four LED clusters and four photodiodes. These enable the Watch to monitor your blood oxygen levels. This in addition to Apple Watch’s ability to monitor your heart rate.
While all this doubles-down on its emphasis on health and fitness features, Apple’s keen to stress that the Watch is not a medical device. Going hand-in-wrist with this new functionality is a Blood Oxygen app, and there’s an ECG app too. To use the latter, you simply touch the Digital Crown with your finger for 30 seconds at any time and the electrodes within it will measure your electrocardiogram (ECG) activity and warn you if there’s anything amiss. Again, while this can be useful, it’s no substitute for proper tests carried out by a qualified physician.
3. Display
The Apple Watch 6 display uses OLED technology, and it’s a fine-looking screen as a result. When you’re in darker places, it’s only the numbers, letters or whatever’s on the screen that you can see, as OLED technology enables incredible contrast between the black and white tones, which makes whatever is on the Apple Watch 6 look really striking.
Where older Apple Watch models (and the new Apple Watch SE) require you to raise your wrist to see what the time is or check a notification, the Watch 6 continues where the Watch 5 left off with an always-on display.
This means you don’t need to raise your wrist to see the time or an alert, and can just glance down to see what’s happening. Depending on the watch face you’ve got set up – and there are now many – you’ll also see updated info on news, health stats, or battery life without needing to raise up the Apple Watch and fully wake your device (which will use more power).
However, while this is useful, we feel it’s still not well-implemented. The always-on display is helpful at times, but mostly we just want to see the time. The problem is that, even though the screen of the Apple Watch 6 dims when it’s not being looked at, it’s still rather bright.
So whenever things get darker, you either need to put it into theater mode (which is irritating to do, and then requires a button-press to display the time), begin sleep tracking to get the low-light monochrome version of the display, or just accept that your watch will be glowing rather brightly.
4. Battery life
The Apple Watch 6 is rated for the same 18-hour battery life as the Apple Watch Series 5, Series 4, and Series 3 before it. Although, as expected, I didn’t even get a full 18-hours on days I did GPS-guided workouts. We really would have liked to see some improvement in this area, but for now, the daily change is still needed.
On the bright side, the Apple Watch 6 can be charged to full in 90 minutes. It takes my Apple Watch 5 closer to 2 hours to fully charge.
5. watchOS 7
The Apple Watch 6 is the showcase for the latest version of Apple’s wearable operating system, but the usual caveats apply: the same features (blood oxygen monitoring excepted) are also coming to the new Apple Watch SE, and will be rolled out to every device from the Watch 3 onwards.
However, we’re interested in testing how these new features perform on the Watch 6, to see how well-optimized the device is for them. There are some we’ve not delved into here, such as dancing and cool-down monitoring in fitness, new ways to personalize and share your Watch face with your own complications, and mapping your bike rides on the go – you can find out all about those, and others, in our dedicated watchOS 7 hub.