Watch Series 8
Mid-tier smartwatch gets iterative update with few new features
From £419 (41mm) / £449 (45mm) FROM apple.com/uk FEATURES 41mm or 45mm case size, Apple S8 processor, Always-On Retina display, dust-resistant to IP6X, water-resistant to 50m, up to 18 hours’ battery life, GPS, mobile connectivity options
The Apple Watch Series 8 feels like the slightly forgotten middle sibling in a family of three – sandwiched being the flashy new Apple Watch Ultra (see p24) with its rugged design, Action button and dual-channel GPS, and the Apple Watch SE (see p27), which shares many features with the Apple Watch Series 8, but at £259 for 40mm and £299 for the 44mm, costs up to £160 less.
The Apple Watch Series 8 is also practically identical to last year’s Apple Watch Series 7 – it shares the same rounded-corner case design with an edge-to-edge Always-On Retina display in 41mm and 45mm case sizes, is still dust-resistant to IP6X and waterresistant up to 50m – and offers identical battery life of up to 18 hours between recharges. Put an Apple Watch Series 7 and Apple Watch Series 8 side by side and they’re impossible to tell apart, with the biggest changes externally being to the finishes – aluminium Series 8s come in Midnight, Starlight, Silver and (Product)Red, while stainless steel versions come in Silver, Gold and Graphite.
Prices, not surprisingly, have changed too. While the Apple Watch Series 7 cost £369 (41mm) and £419 (45mm) when it arrived last year, the new models are more expensive at £419 and £449 respectively. All of which makes the Watch Series 8 a hard sell in a world where both the affordable Apple Watch SE and more capable Apple Watch Ultra exist, and there are still enough Apple Watch Series 7 models kicking around to make it worthwhile picking up one of those instead.
And yet, the Apple Watch Series 8 also has a long list of benefits in the ‘pro’ column. It remains a brilliant and highly capable smartwatch for most people, but now adds Crash Detection – which enables the Watch to identify if and when you’ve been involved in a serious car accident and so alert the emergency services automatically – and includes two new temperature sensors, which are able to record fluctuations in your body temperature (and the things that might affect it, such as
illness, alcohol, jet lag or ovulation) as you sleep. As with the Apple Watch Series 7, the Apple Watch Series 8 also includes an Always-On Retina display, an ECG and a blood oxygen sensor, all of which the Apple Watch SE lacks. The Apple Watch Series 8 also has a Low Power Mode, which can extend its battery life by 18 hours to a maximum of 36. Plus the Watch Series 8 also benefits from Apple’s S8 chip, the same one used in the Apple Watch Ultra and Watch SE, giving you a degree of future proofing when it comes to watchOS updates.
Talking of watchOS updates, watchOS 9 has introduced a range of new features to help you make the most of the Watch, including a redesigned Compass app (also available on the Apple Watch Ultra), that includes a Backtrack option so you can retrace your steps should you get lost, medication reminders to help keep tabs on any medicines you need to take, improved sleep tracking and welcome additions to the Workout app, including those that will be particularly useful to runners, such as Stride Length, Ground Contact Time and Vertical Oscillation (which measures how much you ‘bounce’ up and down while running).
Performance
In use, the Apple Watch Series 8 is just as easy to use as the Watch Series 7, with a red-ringed Digital Crown/Home button on the right-hand side for scrolling through apps and their features, plus a Side button for quickly gaining access to features such as Apple Pay on your Watch. We love that the larger screen size of the Watch Series 8 (and Series 7 before it) is big enough to accommodate a full-size QWERTY keyboard – handy for those times when you want to type rather than orally compose messages and emails on your Watch.
As with other Apple Watch models, the Series 8 offers a wide range of customisation options – from straps and bands to highly configurable Watch faces, including Astronomy, which gives you a real-time view of your location on planet Earth; Metropolitan, which enables you to change the size and shape of the digits around the face by rotating the Digital Crown; and Portraits, which uses the depth information contained within images in your Photos library.
The Series 8 remains the best Apple Watch for most of us, but lacks a killer feature this time around, especially when compared to the Watch Ultra or more affordable Apple Watch SE. If you own a Watch Series 6 or Series 7, there’s little real reason to upgrade; while owners of older Apple Watch models may prefer to consider the Series 8’s siblings instead. In other words, the Series 8 feel very middle of the road – it won’t disappoint you, but it probably won’t excite you too much either. Rob Mead-Green