My Apple Watch Ultra Isn’t Getting watchOS 27
I’ve been a day-one Apple Watch user. I still have a “Series 0” that I had to cut the battery out of because it became swollen over time in my desk drawer because I’m a nerd sometimes and I collect random shit like this. I really have liked this line of devices over the years.
A few years ago, I upgraded to an Apple Watch Ultra because I wanted the extra battery life since I was working some early morning shifts and wouldn’t always have time to charge the thing every morning. My other thought with this device was that I would just wear it until the battery would give me less than a day of life since Apple routinely gives Apple Watches a good five years or so of major software upgrades every September. By that, I should have another good couple of years of this device.
HA! Jokes on me!
Apple kicked off their annual developers’ conference with their usual software announcements, and the original Apple Watch Ultra is not included in the upgrade list this year. This also applies to anything from the Series 8 and lower. Why? Because these models lack the Neural Engine that comes on the chip of the newer models. That Neural Engine is what controls all the on-device machine learning stuff (aka AI).
Apple has leaned hard into artificial intelligence, which they’re calling “Apple Intelligence”, this year, to the point they partnered with Google to build frameworks for this stuff. Much of their main intent is to be able to run as much of this stuff on-device as possible. In regards to the Apple Watch, that means being able to do this without the assistance of an iPhone tethered to it. Being able to do this on-device allows Apple to do these things as privately as possible since it does so without reaching to an external network. There are other benefits to this as well, but in regards to the Apple Watch, it means you can leave your phone at home more when working out.
You can’t really miss what you never had, but the features older Watches won’t gain are things like the new Siri AI, Dynamic App Grid, Workout Buddy enhancements, and some new gestures. Otherwise, the Watch will actually work fine for tracking your workouts and other activity. It’ll still work pretty much like it does today come this fall. Where things will change over time is when developers, including Apple’s own, stop testing apps for compatibility with watchOS 26 and earlier. That’s when things will start to break on the software side.
I’ve mentioned before how I thought about embracing traditional mechanical watches once my Ultra Series 1 is no longer in service, maybe embracing something like an Oura ring to track my activity and metrics. In some ways, this pushes me closer to that point. In other ways, I feel like riding this thing out until I no longer can. And in even other ways, I just want to finance a new Ultra, hoping Apple won’t shit on me quite as fast this time around. We’ll see.
In the meantime, I thought I’d shed some light on this situation a little, as I know people with older Watches who also won’t get this upgrade. Long version short, your Watch will work fine for a while, at least a year, depending on your battery life.
