Apple Watch Series 10 review: Bigger, slimmer, better

As a reviewer, the Apple Watch Series 10 has put me in a difficult position. On the one hand I want to get a review up and into the world as fast as I possibly can, once I’ve used it as my primary smartwatch for a few days. On the other hand, one of the major new features – sleep apnoea detection – can take up to a month to kick in and I don’t feel I can deliver a complete verdict until I’ve given that a thorough workout.

Still, I already know what my feelings are about the new wearable in most other aspects and so here are my initial thoughts. In short, this is Apple’s best smartwatch yet, its most usable and most fully featured, and while battery life is disappointing (still), there is no better wearable on the market.

Apple Watch Series 10 review: What you need to know

To be clear, it’s not just the Apple Watch Series 10 that will get sleep apnoea detection. WatchOS 11 is also bringing it to the Watch Ultra 2 and the Series 9. But with Apple making such a fuss over it at launch, I feel it’s a significant part of the overall package and worth taking into account.

So what else is new? Most notably, and obviously, the size and shape has changed, albeit not dramatically. The Series 10 is available in 42mm and 46mm sizes – a 1mm difference compared to the Series 9 – it’s thinner, also by 1mm, coming in at 9.7mm, and the active screen area is larger by 9%. In fact, the display on the Series 10 is bigger now than the screen on the Apple Watch Ultra 2, a wearable whose most significant upgrade this year is a new black finish.

The display on the Apple Watch Series 10 has also seen improvements, with an OLED panel that uses new wide-angle tech to make it brighter when viewed off-axis. It also now refreshes at 1Hz in always-on display mode, meaning you can see the seconds ticking by, even when the watch is in standby.

There’s a new polished Jet Black finish on the Watch Series 10, pictured here, and the stainless model has been replaced with a lighter titanium body in natural, gold or slate colourways. The physical changes are rounded off by a new metal back that has the cellular antenna integrated into the case itself. Oh, and it’s also possible to play music and podcasts via the watch’s speaker, which isn’t as crazy an idea as it first sounds.

Elsewhere, there’s a new depth gauge and water temperature sensor, turning the Watch Series 10 into a kind of part-time dive computer, albeit one that can only be used for snorkelling or freediving down to a depth of six metres. And, inside, is a larger wireless charging coil that delivers faster charge rates. Unfortunately, there’s no change in how long the watch lasts away from the mains. The Series 10 is still rated at a mere 18 hours, which means you’ll need to charge it at least once a day.

That’s it for features specific to the Apple Watch Series 10, although there are a bunch of new features that arrive courtesy of WatchOS 11, such as the brilliant new Tides app, but like the sleep apnoea detection, these features aren’t exclusive to the Series 10.

Apple Watch Series 10 review: Price and competition

Somewhat surprisingly, Apple has chosen to keep the price of the Apple Watch at the same level as last year, with the 42mm aluminium model starting at £399, and the 46mm at £429. The Titanium Apple Watch Series 10 prices are £699 and £749, with prices rising depending on the watch band you choose.

There is no better smartwatch for iPhone owners, so your main choices are whether to buy this, the more expensive Apple Watch Ultra 2 for £799 or the £219 Watch SE. The Watch Ultra 2 is the Apple watch to buy if you want the longest possible battery life, while the SE is the cutdown, smaller alternative lacking key features like the always-on display.

Alternatively, you could go for something that’s platform agnostic like a Huawei Watch Fit 3 for £139 or Huawei Watch GT 5 with prices starting at £230 for better battery life but not as many features. Or something sporty like a Garmin Fenix 7 for around £400. I would suggest considering the latest Fenix 8 but that’s ridiculously expensive with prices starting at £949.

Apple Watch Series 10 review: Design

This is the first time the Apple Watch has had a serious redesign since the Series 7 was introduced back in 2021 and despite the seemingly small numbers, the larger screen and watch body make a surprisingly big difference to the overall look and feel. It sits noticeably lower on the wrist, and the more softly curved edges lend the Series 10 a significantly more elegant look.

That extra screen real estate makes a palpable difference to readability and general usability, too. It adds an extra line to messages, making the Watch a more effective tool for triaging your emails and social media updates. During workouts, larger onscreen text makes it slightly easier to read and the keys on the onscreen keyboard are 20% larger, too, however it’s still fiddly to use.

– The Apple Watch Series 10 (right) is noticeably bigger than the Series 9 (left)

I can’t say I really noticed the boosted wide-angle viewability of the new LTPO 3 technology. Yes, the display does look brighter compared with the Apple Watch Series 9 when viewed from the side, but I’m not sure how often I’ll actually find this useful, especially as the non-wide angle screen on the older model was always pretty readable off-axis anyway. Neither did I notice the new, faster S10 chip. The Apple Watch has always felt perfectly responsive to me – this one is no different.

– The Apple Watch Series 10’s display (left) is slightly more readable off-axis thanks to new wide-angle OLED tech

However, the 1Hz always-on display refresh rate is a rather lovely new feature, allowing you to see the seconds tick away without having to raise your wrist. It’s just a shame it doesn’t work with every watch face, and I’d love for Apple to implement it properly in the stopwatch app. Bizarrely, the seconds only tick by in the stopwatch app if the total elapsed time is below a minute. Longer than that and the display freezes, only updating once a minute. WHY?

One of the features I like even more than this in the new Series 10, however, is the ability to play media through the watch’s onboard speaker. I didn’t expect to but I’m a convert. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not advising that people play Brat on full volume from the back seat of the bus on their Apple Watch Series 10.

I certainly won’t be doing that, but in a quiet house while working at home it’s quite nice to be able to listen to the radio or a podcast, and have that audio follow me as I get up and walk around – without having to pick up my phone and pop it in my pocket. And, assuming it’s not tucked out of the way under a cuff, the speaker tends to be closer to my ear than my phone’s speaker, too.

Bear in mind that it will drain the battery a little more than usual, but given you’ll be charging the Series 10 every day anyway, that’s not too much of a bother.

I do wish Apple made the feature a little more intuitive to use, though. It took several minutes of prodding buttons and tapping menu items on the watch face before working out what to do, and there appears to be no way to elegantly switch from playing something on the phone to playing something on the watch, or vice versa.

You play something on the watch, or play it on your smartphone, but they remain separate entities. If you want to stop playing something on the watch, you have to pause it there, then switch sources and start playing it on the phone – and it won’t pick up where you left off. It’s bafflingly obtuse.

Apple Watch Series 10 review: Sleep apnoea detection and Watch OS 11

As pointed out previously, I’m not ready to pass judgement on the sleep apnoea detection. You need to wear your Apple Watch for at least ten nights in any 30-day period to activate it and I haven’t hit that threshold just yet. What I will say, however, is that I haven’t had the best experience in trying to set it up.

Given it’s one of the big new health features this year, I expected maybe a little pop-up the first time I fired up Apple Health, advising me what I need to do to enable the feature, but there was nothing. No explanation, not even a progress bar to tell you how far along the road you are to getting it working. It turns out a bug in WatchOS 11 was preventing some users from seeing the option, which is disappointing and annoying for this review, but it’s a wrinkle that should eventually sort itself out.

Once it kicks in, the watch represents this in its new Breathing Disturbances metric, which displays on a chart like other health metrics, showing how many disturbances you experience on a given night and over time. It analyses this data once every 30 days and sends a notification if it notices that on more than 50% of nights your breathing disturbances were at elevated levels. At this point, you can have the Health app produce a PDF report that you can take along to your doctor.

It’s a similar story with the new Apple Watch Vitals app. You need to wear your watch while you sleep for five nights before it will give you any useful information. Once this threshold has been reached, you’ll see a snapshot of health metrics recorded while you sleep – heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, sleep duration and blood oxygen levels (although the latter is currently disabled in the US due to a patent dispute) – and whether those levels are normal or out of range compared with your recent history.

My favourite new WatchOS 11 features, however, are offline maps and the new Tides app. The former gives you the ability to download offline maps and navigate pre-planned routes on the watch without the need to take your phone with you. Of course, you’ve been able to get offline maps before by using third-party apps like the excellent Workoutdoors, but this is the first time the feature has been included officially.

The one catch here is that offline maps aren’t integrated into the workout app, so if you like to explore while you’re out for a run, you’ll have to plan your route and workout separately and manually switch between the relevant screens on the watch itself. This is fairly easy to do but it would be nice to be able to navigate and view workout metrics simultaneously.

Slightly less impressive is the addition of training load to the Apple Watch’s workout experience. This provides an estimate of the effort level – on a scale of 1 to 10 – of any workout you track using the Workout app, and it displays this whenever you complete a run, hike, swim or whatever. You then get the opportunity to confirm it, or tweak it if you think the workout was easier or harder, and once it has enough data, it works that into a view showing your effort levels over the past seven days compared with the past 28 days. The idea is that you can gauge if you’re progressing steadily in your training efforts, maintaining fitness or falling behind.

While that’s fine, what I’d really like to see from Apple’s workout tools are more finely tuned recommendations. For instance, when I’m wearing a Garmin watch, it will tell me specifically whether I’ve overtrained on a particular day and haven’t recovered properly yet, or if I had particularly poor sleep and today is a day for rest. Apple’s tools don’t do this, instead leaving you to make up your own mind.

Yes, you can use the Vitals app to give you a clue as to whether you’ve recovered well or poorly, and tie that into your long-term fitness goals and training load, but I’d prefer to be handheld through this sort of stuff for the most part – and I think that is the position most Apple Watch owners fall into as well.

Apple Watch Series 10 review: Performance

Although there are lots of new features to wrap your head around in this generation of Apple Watch, the sensors have mostly remained the same. There’s no dual-band GPS, as the Apple Watch Ultra 2 has, and the optical heart rate sensor is using the same hardware as before, too.

You’d think this would mean identical levels of performance and accuracy, but that isn’t necessarily the case. The size and weight of a watch affect the accuracy of its heart-rate monitor, and the positioning of the antennae around the case may impact GPS accuracy. Since both of these elements are new this year, you can expect to see differences.

So far, I’ve seen a small deterioration across the tests that I have run. I usually compare distance to my Stryd gen 3 running footpod, and heart rate accuracy to a Polar H10 chest strap, and across around 10km of outdoor running, I’ve seen variance averaging at 2.94% for distance and 5.66% for heart rate. Neither of these are particularly egregious results but it is worse than either the Watch Series 9, whose heart rate and distance and heart rate variance numbers were lower at 0.72% and 1.43% respectively, and the Watch Ultra 2, which sat at 1.04% and 0.76%.

As a side note, I’ve also observed the same behaviour from the Apple Watch’s optical sensor that I’ve seen for a few years now: it will occasionally simply lose heart rate lock mid-run, resulting in gaps in the heart rate trace. It doesn’t happen particularly often but worth noting for anyone who plans to buy an Apple Watch who trains to heart rate targets. On the other hand, if training to heart rate is that important to you, you’re probably better off buying a chest belt or using an armband for more accurate, responsive readings anyway and pairing that with your Apple Watch instead.

Battery life, as mentioned, is the same as with previous Apple watches. It’s a disappointing 18 hours – one day of use, in other words – but there is improvement in the speed of charging. With the bundled wireless charging pad, I was able to reach 77% charge in 30 minutes (Apple says it can get to 80% in this time – that’s close enough), which is enough to get you through the working day – or a solid night’s sleep.

Apple Watch Series 10 review: Verdict

The Apple Watch Series 10 is the biggest, most significant upgrade the Apple Watch has had for years. Its larger screen makes it more readable and easier to use than previous models, while the thinner profile and softer, more rounded edges means it looks a tad more elegant. Plus, there’s a host of new features that add to the watch’s overall utility. I’m a big fan of offline maps and the training load features and, while they’re fairly basic for now, I can’t wait to see how Apple develops those in the future.

Add sleep apnoea detection to the mix – yet another health tool in the Apple Watch’s already comprehensive selection of health detection tools – atrial fibrillation, blood oxygen level, sleep detection and so on – and you have a killer smartwatch that pulls even further ahead of the competition.

If it weren’t for its poor battery life – surely Apple with all its resources can do better than 18 hours – the Apple Watch Series 10 would win a resounding five star review and a Best Buy award. As it is, it tops out at 5/5 and a Recommended award: a brilliant smartwatch with one fatal flaw.