If you’re thinking about buying an Apple Watch, you’ll want to know whether or not Apple is likely to launch a new model in the near future. After all, there are few things worse than spending hundreds of dollars on a tech device only to see it superseded by something better (and potentially cheaper) a couple of months later. Macworld is here to help you avoid that nightmare scenario.
At the time of writing, Apple sells three smartwatches: the SE 3, the Series 11, and the Ultra 3. All three were announced in September last year, which means we’re expecting at least one to be updated in the next few months.
In this article we’ve gathered all the information currently available about the new Apple Watch(es) coming in 2026. This includes rumors about the likely release date, changes to the design, the tech specs and features of the new models, and their expected pricing.
For detailed comparison of Apple’s smartwatches, check out our giant guide to the best Apple Watch in 2026.
Apple products can be divided into two categories: Those that get a new model every year like clockwork (the iPhone and the Apple Watch), and those that don’t (everything else). In other words, yes, Apple is going to release a new watch soon.
Every September since 2016, the company has announced a new “Series” brand Apple Watch. The schedule is so regular that you can set your smartwatch by it. So the Series 12 will almost certainly make its first appearance at a special press event in September 2026, alongside the iPhone 18 Pro, which will be held on September 9.
The latest rumors say we will be getting an Ultra 4 but will have to wait at last another year for a new SE.
The SE and Ultra sub-brands are less predictable, unfortunately, than the Series models. Yes, the SE 3 and Ultra 3 were both announced on September 9, 2025. But new models don’t come out every year. The schedule is less regular:
Last summer, a report from DigiTimes raised hopes that 2026 would see the Apple Watch get its first major redesign. But such rumors come up fairly regularly (there was lots of talk about a flat Apple Watch Series X around the time of the Series 7), and so far none of them have materialised.
Indeed, three months later, the Weibo poster Instant Digital insisted that neither the Series 12 nor the Series 13 would get a new look, and that the big redesign was actually coming in 2028. This is how it tends to go: pundits and leakers get publicity from predicting Apple Watch redesigns, and then Apple ends up sticking to essentially the same design because it dominates the market and doesn’t need to take any risks.
Based on this, and the fact that nobody has leaked any radical new CAD drawings or photos of a redesigned chassis from the supply chain, we’d cautiously predict that (aside, potentially, from a slightly larger screen, fractionally slimmer bezels, or a new color), the Apple Watch is going to stay essentially the same for yet another year. But for the sake of variety, we’d love to be wrong about that.
However, a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman claims that Apple has tested a white and dark gray ceramic model that could make an appearance this year. The last time Apple sold a ceramic watch was the Edition model in 2019.
Whereas design tends to stay largely the same from year to year, as discussed above, Apple habitually makes worthwhile upgrades to the Apple Watch’s internals.
Let’s start with the processor, and this is one pattern that changed last year. Every Apple Watch from Series 1 to 10 had a corresponding chip, from the S1 to the S10. But the Series 11 came with… the S10 again. Even the Ultra 3 was stuck with the previous year’s chip.
It’s unlikely that Apple will freeze the processor for another year, so we’d expect the Series 12 to get something new. Whether that will be an S11 (logical) or S12 (neater, since it matches the Series number, plus it sounds newer and therefore better) doesn’t really matter to customers, since the labels are more of a marketing tool than anything else. The real-world performance upgrade varies widely from generation to generation; in fact, the S6, S7, and S8 were essentially identical.
