Apple Watch Series 9 vs Series 8
Intro
What's new in the Apple Watch Series 9 compared to the previous Apple Watch Series 8?
Well, the brief answer is this: not much! The new Apple Watch Series 9 looks and feels the same, with the same 41mm/45mm sizes, but you do get the first processor upgrade in years with a new Apple S9 chip and you also get a screen twice as bright as before.
The marquee new feature, however, is an old trick in new clothing: Double Tap! An accessibility feature only a few knew existed, graduates to the mainstream with the Series 9, but you don't get it launch. It's coming in a software update that is scheduled to arrive before the end of the year!
With this in mind, let's break down exactly what is new with this new Apple Watch and see if it even deserves to be called new at all.
Apple Watch Series 9 vs Apple Watch Series 8
- New S9 chip with faster performance
- 2x brighter, 2000-nits display
- Ultra Wideband (UWB) chip for precision finding
- Double Tap control gesture (coming later this year)
Table of Contents:
Colors & Sizes
New pink body!
Guess which one is the Series 9! (You can't because they look the same)
The stainless steel model of the same sizes is now only available in a GPS+Cellular/LTE version in gold, silver, and graphite cases.
Bands
Leather gives way to woven bands
Apple deprecated the leather smartwatch straps of the Series 8, and the Apple Watch Series 9 gives you a new "finewoven" fabric bands instead. Those come with a magnetic buckle, similar to the Modern Buckle strap, and there are also new Hermes and Nike straps that are all about recycling. Of course, these new bands are backwards compatible with previous Apple Watch models.
Apple says that the new FineWoven band that replaces the leather straps is a "luxurious and durable microtwill made of 68 percent post-consumer recycled content that has significantly lower carbon emissions compared to leather." FineWoven feels like suede, claims Apple, and comes with the Magnetic Link and Modern Buckle bands. In our experience, the band is nice, but lacks the character and softness of leather, and we would not describe it as "luxurious". It's a fine strap, just not too impressive and probably not worth the high price tag. Luckily, if you want a leather strap, there is a huge variety of options from other brands.
Performance & Features
New S9 chip
A new and faster chip, but can you really tell the difference in daily use? We couldn't, as previous watches already felt fast enough
In the last three generations of Apple Watches - the Series 6, Series 7 and Series 8 - Apple used different chip names (S6, S7 and S8 respectively), but all of those chips were based on the same design with a dual-core CPU with the T8301 identifier and were largely based on the Apple A13 Bionic chip design. The only performance improvement claim from Apple came way back with Series 6 and S6 chip, which the company said launched apps 20 percent faster.
The Apple Watch Series 9 debuts a new S9 chip, based on the A15 Bionic. This new piece of silicon delivers big gains in speed and also efficiency, which would result in apps launching faster and longer battery life too.
Apple Watch Series 9 now comes with upgraded quad-core Neural Engine that can process machine learning tasks up to twice as fast, when compared with Apple Watch Series 8. The very same new S9 chip also powers the Apple Watch Ultra Gen 2.
Double Tap gesture
While it exists in the accessibility options of the Series 8 watches, the S9 chip allows the Double Tap function to take a whole new universe of tasks. Pinching your fingers together now triggers "the primary button in an app so it can be used to stop a timer, play and pause music, or snooze an alarm."
You can also take or end calls with the Double Tap option, or snap a picture using the Camera Remote function of the Apple Watch 9. One can open Smart Stack from the watch face with it, and go through the widgets with another finger pinch. Take that, Apple Watch 8!
Faster on-device Siri for secure personal health and fitness queries
Thanks to the S9 chipset, Siri requests can now be processed on the watch itself for a way faster and more accurate responses. The new quad-core Neural Engine now makes dictation with up to 25% better accuracy than the Apple Watch Series 8.
Battery and Charging
Same battery sizes, but '18-hour battery life'
You have to charge it every day
- 41mm — 282 mAh
- 45mm — 308 mAh
And despite that new chip, battery life is the same, rated at 18 hours by Apple itself.
In simpler terms, you do have to charge your watch every night, or if you want to track your sleep, you could use it from one morning to the next one, and then give it a quick recharge, but you won't be able to go two days between charges.
Models and Prices
- $399/$429 for the 41mm/45mm aluminum Wi-fi model
- $699/$749 for the 41mm/45mm stainless steel cellular version
Apple didn't raise the $399 base price of the new Apple Watch Series 9 41 mm aluminum model, but added $100 to the starting tag of the stainless steel version as it is now only offered as a GPS + Cellular version.
Summary
While the Apple Watch Series 9 is a minor upgrade in terms of design, it is the biggest hardware upgrade for the past three years or so. The handy Double Tap gesture that used to be a clunky Accessibility option is worth checking out when it comes out later this year, and it's nice to have slightly faster Siri and a new S9 chipset.
But for the vast majority of people, those are rather minor improvements and definitely not good reasons to upgrade from a perfectly capable Series 8 watch.
Apple is rumored to be preparing some bigger changes for the anniversary Apple Watch Series X edition next year, but considering the slow pace of innovation in this space, we should probably have modest expectations and hopefully Apple manages to surpass them.
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