The Apple Watch Ultra 4 is here, four years and three generations removed from the watch that started the line.
Apple's new flagship wearable starts at $799 and brings a brighter, larger display, the S11 chip with 4GB of RAM, and a new Health Sensing System with always-on optical heart-rate sensors. Battery life jumps to 50 hours of normal use, up from 36 hours on the original, and charging is faster too. The watch adds sleep apnea and hypertension notifications, on-device Siri, and 5G connectivity with better weak-signal reception. Apple discontinued the original Ultra in 2023, and it can no longer run watchOS 27, the current operating system.
The real story here isn't the spec sheet - it's that most of what's new only matters to a specific kind of owner. If your three-to-four-year-old Ultra still gets you through a day and a workout, losing watchOS 27 support costs you app-grid tweaks and on-device Siri, not core functionality. The upgrade case gets much stronger if you're an endurance athlete, frequent traveler, or someone who wants denser health data to act on, since battery life, satellite reliability, and recovery metrics are where the real gains sit.
Four generations in, Apple's wearable upgrades look less like leaps and more like a slow accumulation of reasons to wait one more year - until your battery, not your operating system, makes the decision for you.