2024 is an important year for the people in Cupertino because it is the 10th anniversary of the Apple Watch. In early September 2024, aBlogtoWatch joined Apple at the Steve Jobs Theater for the announcement of the 10th major version, Apple Watch Series 10 (and the iPhone 16). The latest and greatest Apple-designed and manufactured smartwatch has been a dominant player in the wristwatch space for years now. For a company that prefers to look forward, little was mentioned about the fact that this was an anniversary year for the Apple Watch. Look closely, however, and you can tell that Apple is doing far more than simply offering incremental improvements to its technology products. 2024 is the year that Apple dominates the catwalk.
In 2014, I recall being asked to join Apple for an announcement that I would find interesting. They did not tell me they were launching a watch, and the news of the first Apple Watch sent considerable tremors through the traditional timepiece industry. What was shocking for me at the time was that the Apple Watch was not being positioned exclusively as a small computer, but rather as a new category of device that Apple referred to as “its most personal product yet.” What made the Apple Watch “personal” was the fact that you were wearing it. Rather than just trying to develop a smartwatch in a vacuum, Apple was very directly influenced by the traditional timepiece industry and its iconic products. From the very start, it was clear to me that Apple had ambitions to do more than make a smartwatch — it wanted to make a 21st-century version of a timepiece that would follow in the cultural and emotional footsteps of beautiful tool watches that came before it.
Apple used construction materials, features, design language, and terminology from the traditional watch industry for the Apple Watch. What I didn’t know back then is whether Apple’s interest in traditional watches was simply a temporary starting point to launch its new wearable product, or if its product development teams would continue on the path of making an advanced technology device that was also beautiful and wearable. Now, 10 years into the lifespan of the Apple Watch, it is clear to me that despite the inherent futurism of the Apple Watch, it wants a place in the pantheon of history’s greatest timepieces. The Apple Watch’s software features are increasingly impressive each year, but in this article, I am going to focus on the hardware and physical design of the latest Series 10 Apple Watches and discuss how Apple is just as focused on beauty and wearability as it is on state-of-the-art functionality.
Apple Keynote press conferences are understandably dominated by technology journalists who spend their time thinking about software compatibility and the performance of new integrated circuit chips. They aren’t experts on fashion, and they aren’t experts on form. I was thus a bit bemused to see many of the present journalists and opinion leaders miss much of the main point of the Apple Watch Series 10, which was that it was thinner, prettier, and more alive than ever before. Most were understandably preoccupied with Apple’s upcoming “Apple Intelligence” features coming to the Apple Watch and iPhone soon (as of the time of writing). What was a bit more challenging for attendees to understand was why Apple was focused on a thinner, often lighter, and shinier Apple Watch product than before.
More so than any other major tech company I am familiar with, Apple is obsessed with image. This, of course, started with Steve Jobs and continues in full force under Apple’s Tim Cook. That focus on image translates into the Apple Watch in a variety of interesting ways. It started with Apple wanting fashion and luxury industry acceptance of the Apple Watch (e.g., the placement of Apple Watches on fashion magazine covers and the relationship with Hermes, which continues today), and that obsession with image means that Apple wants the Apple Watch to look as good as possible. People should understand that the effort to make the Apple Watch look as good as possible is, in many ways, an entirely different investment and engineering challenge than simply making the Apple Watch perform as well as possible. Anyone trying to understand the character of the Apple Watch should not dismiss the parallel but ultimately different types of engineering and development that a product like the Apple Watch receives.
If there is one term I can use to sum up the personality of the Apple Watch Series 10 products, it would be something like “shiny.” Aside from the more “tacti-cool” feel of the matte-finished Titanium Apple Watch Ultra models, the Series 10 aluminum and titanium watches are designed to appear as polished as possible. The neat engineering story here is that these polished surfaces are materials that people usually don’t see (especially at these price levels) with a polished surface. It doesn’t take too much investigation to find out that consumers associate highly reflective surfaces with product quality and desirability. The mainstream can look at cars, where chrome surfaces are often applied to cosmetically enhance the visual perceived value of a vehicle. Of course, the traditional wristwatch and jewelry industry is all about shiny, glimmering, polished surfaces. People see polishes (good polishes that is) and associate more prestige or value with something. Accordingly, Apple has invested huge resources to make polished yet practical products.
The most popular polished metal for wristwatches is stainless steel. Steel can be given a high-sheen polish relatively easily, and steel is also a very strong and cost-effective metal. Really, its only major downside is weight. Steel has been used as a case material for many previous versions of the Apple Watch, but for 2024, the only new steel products are some of the available bracelets (such as the mesh metal bracelet seen in the pictures in this article). There is no new steel Apple Watch – and yet both the aluminum and titanium versions of the Apple Watch Series 10 look like polished, sometimes colored steel. The innovation here was to create the Apple Watch out of materials that are lighter than steel but to retain the desired look of a polished steel case.
Apple did this both to the aluminum and titanium case materials of the two major versions of the Apple Watch Series 10 respectively (each version comes in two sizes as well as a variety of different color finishes). The key was developing a series of manufacturing processes to make this possible. The core technology Apple uses for processing both aluminum and titanium is the same: an anodization process followed by a molecular bonding process. More so, the company can do this with polished aluminum and titanium. Polished aluminum is rarely found in wristwatches because of how scratch-prone it is, and the story is similar with titanium. So what Apple does is first polish the metals, and then coat them using an electro-plating or physical vapor deposition process. The anodization process prepares the metal for molecular bonding, and the materials that are then bonded both add color and scratch resistance to metal surfaces. The result is lightweight and durable cases that are also beautifully polished and wear-resistant. None of this helps the technology device track your activity or health any better, but it goes a long way in helping people to feel their Apple Watches are more attractive (and thereby make the wearer feel more attractive). It can be easy to dismiss this effort as superficial, but I would argue that such superficiality is exactly what separates an interesting timepiece from a boring one.
Before we move on to talking about the important updates to the Apple Watch Series 10 screen, I want to talk about Apple’s considerable effort to make the Apple Watch about 10 percent thinner. That might not sound like much, but anyone familiar with wristwatches knows that a millimeter might as well be a mile when it comes to how much it changes the look and feel of a timepiece on the wrist. In addition to the titanium version of the Apple Watch being about 20 percent lighter than the steel versions, the new Series 10 is a more svelte package and required Apple to mostly re-engineer the already compact inside of the Apple Watch (while making no sacrifices to battery life). While tech enthusiasts might not immediately understand the appeal of a thinner device, your average Apple Watch wearer will appreciate it.
Looking at the traditional watch industry, case thickness is also very important historically. In the 1960s the watch industry was obsessed with making mechanical movements thinner and thinner and, ironically, it is still preoccupied with it today. In just the last few years, the record for the “world’s thinnest watch” was broken and re-broken several times. It isn’t that most wearers need a record-setting thin timepiece, but the reality is that the thinner a watch is, the more comfortable it tends to be. Apple is pretty direct in that it wants people wearing the Apple Watch while they are awake, while they are sleeping, and while they are sitting, or while they are active. The easier (and more satisfying) it is to wear an Apple Watch, the stickier the device will be. Thus allowing Apple to present more features, and users to benefit from an ever-expanding set of data tracking and personalized recommendations.
2024 was also the first time I recall Apple releasing new watch faces exclusively about fun and style. My favorite Apple Watch faces can be customized with “complications” that show you various bits of information, but Apple also has some purely cosmetic ones that usually only tell the time. Wearers are split between those who want a fun or attractive Apple Watch face and those who want as much information as possible at any given time. Apple has options for both types of consumers, but given the “shiny” theme of 2024, the new watch faces emphasize the Apple Watch as a beautiful object, as opposed to a tech tool. The “Reflections” watch face is a perfect example. Users can select from a series of colors on an animated graphic that looks like a sunburst-style piece of guilloche-engraved metal. Using the Apple Watch’s built-in accelerometer, the lighting effects on the Reflections watch face change with subtle movements of the wrist. The goal is to simulate the look of natural light reflecting on the surface. This is a complicated feature for tech writers to discuss because it addresses an element of consumer psychology that they are not typically accustomed to writing about, but it nevertheless does represent how technology can be used to make things more attractive (as opposed to more useful).
I get the impression that if Apple were ever able to have a physical surface for the Apple Watch dial, it would. Of course, a screen comes with the infinite ability to display any type of information you want, so Apple can’t exactly move past that. With that said, I totally believe that Apple is probably experimenting with future techniques to create a three-dimensional dial that is also infinitely variable. Something like a three-dimensional e-ink might be able to do something like that, I really don’t know. What I do know is that the tendency at Apple is to make the Apple Watch dial feel more and more alive – similar to a traditional dial as opposed to the screen. 2024 sees some major steps in this direction with a brand-new screen that upgrades the simple process of glancing at your Apple Watch’s face.
The Apple Watch Series 10 screen is the largest screen it has made, which means a very thin bezel and a screen that elegantly wraps around the case. In fact, the Apple Watch Series 10 case is more rounded and pebble-like than ever before. This makes it both nice to touch and a more visually beautiful object than ever before. The screen is also enhanced with a wider viewing area for the individual OLEDs. Apple didn’t per se make the organic light-emitting diodes any brighter, but it did engineer them to disperse light across a wider area. The practical outcome of this is that you can read information on the Apple Watch screen from a wider angle. In essence, you can read the dial when seeing it from the side, as opposed to a more straight-on view (just as you might an authentic physical dial). Once again, Apple is being guided not by smartwatch competition in this space, but rather a feature of traditional watches that it very much wants as part of the Apple Watch experience.
One additional upgrade to the Apple Watch screen in the Series 10 is an increased refresh rate to the always-on screen. Having an always-on screen allows the Apple Watch to look more like a traditional watch because the screen is not blank black when you aren’t looking at it. Though for a number of years now the always-on screen was limited to being updated once per minute. This prevented the always-on screen from appearing animated – as a traditional watch dial would. For 2024, Apple updates the refresh rate of the screen to once per second (1 hertz, for those timepieces and frequency nerds). This finally allows for there to be a ticking seconds hand (or other animations) on the Apple Watch dial that makes the face feel more alive and life-like. One funny thing that we noticed on the Reflections watch dial was that the second hand sweeps when it is normally turned on, and then the seconds hand changes to ticking when in the always-on state. This is a very interesting and subtle nod to the fact that the Apple Watch is trying to honor the broader spectrum of timepiece appreciation and culture.
From the slimmer cases to the “I can’t believe it’s not steel” finishes, the Apple Watch Series 10 is a better timepiece than ever before. An upgraded screen makes interacting with the Apple Watch more engaging and fun, and the new continued integration with AI and health-tracking tools means that people will likely be using their Apple Watches more than ever. While Apple didn’t verbally make a big deal out of the 10th anniversary of the Apple Watch, they certainly chose 2024 to release some impressive stuff. Look out for more aBlogtoWatch Apple Watch 2024 coverage including a hands-on of the Apple Watch Ultra 2 in black DLC titanium soon. The Apple Watch Series 10 is available in a 42mm or 46mm long case size. Apple offers a lower-priced aluminum case from $399 – $429 UDS, as well as a fancier titanium case with a sapphire crystal from $699 – $749 USD. An assortment of case color finishes and strap/bracelet choices are further available. Learn more at the Apple Watch website.
