Apple Is Reconsidering the Apple Watch — Screen Included

What was reported

In his Power On newsletter dated 9 August, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman wrote that Apple is considering bringing to market an Apple Watch-style band with no screen at all. He described it as one strand of a broader re-evaluation inside the company, which is looking for "something that transforms the product for a new era."

Gurman reported that Apple has not settled on a direction. A smart ring is under consideration. So is an Apple Watch with a circular display. He put the potential scale of the change alongside the iPhone's move from a single slab to a folding device. Apple has not commented, and no timeline has been reported for any of the three.

The category Apple would be entering

Screenless wrist trackers are not a new idea, but they have had an unusually good year. Whoop, Oura and Google have all shipped screen-free bands or rings, and the argument for them has settled into three points: they weigh less, they last far longer between charges, and they do not interrupt you.

That third point is the interesting one, because it inverts the premise of the Apple Watch. The Apple Watch was sold from 2015 as a way to triage your iPhone's notifications on your wrist. A band with no screen cannot triage anything. It only measures. The buyer of a Whoop strap is buying the absence of a screen, not tolerating it — which makes this a different product philosophy rather than a cheaper version of the same one.

Removing a display is a battery decision before it is a design one

The display is usually the largest single consumer of power in a smartwatch, and on an always-on OLED it dominates the budget. Take it out and the arithmetic changes shape rather than simply improving: the remaining draw is sensors, radio and processing, all of which are comparatively steady.

That is what buys screen-free bands their multi-day battery life, and it is not a marginal gain. It is the difference between a device you take off every night to charge and one you can wear through the night. Sleep tracking, resting heart rate and overnight temperature trends all depend on the device still being on your wrist at 4 a.m. — which is precisely where a watch you charge at bedtime cannot help.

There is a second, less obvious consequence. Without a display, the case can be thinner and lighter, which matters more for sleep than for sport. Comfort at night is a hardware constraint, not a preference.

What a band without watchOS gives up

The Apple Watch is not only a sensor package. It runs watchOS, which means third-party apps, complications, Apple Pay on the wrist, Messages replies, Siri, Workout, Fitness+ integration and Family Setup. Every one of those depends on a screen and on the operating system that draws it.

A screenless band would have to hand all of that back to the iPhone, and would live or die on the quality of one companion app. That is a coherent product — it is roughly what Whoop sells — but it is a substantially narrower one than the device Apple has spent eleven years building out. It would also sit awkwardly beside a services strategy that has been steadily pulling more of Apple's health and fitness business onto the wrist.

Health features do not travel automatically

This is the part most easily missed. The Apple Watch's most consequential health functions — the ECG app, irregular rhythm notifications, hypertension notifications — are regulated features. They are cleared or authorised by health authorities market by market, tied to a specific hardware and software configuration, which is why Apple's own support pages list availability country by country and why some features arrive in one region a year before another.

A new form factor with different sensors, different skin contact and a different placement would not inherit any of that. It would need its own submissions and its own approvals, on the timescale those take. Anyone reading a screenless Apple band as an Apple Watch minus the display should expect the health feature list to be shorter at launch, and to stay shorter for a while, and to differ by country.

What is actually happening in September

None of this concerns the hardware arriving in a few weeks. 9to5Mac reported on 14 August that new Apple Watch models are due next month, in what is expected to be a comparatively quiet generation.

That contrast is the useful frame. Apple appears to be shipping an incremental year on the wrist while examining three mutually exclusive ideas about what should follow it. A ring, a round watch and a screenless band cannot all be the answer; a company weighing all three at once has not chosen yet. Gurman writes that Apple has not settled on a direction, and Apple has announced nothing. A conventional Apple Watch update is what arrives this autumn.

That is also worth holding in mind against the comparison Gurman draws with the folding iPhone. That transition took years of public rumour before a shipping product, and it kept the phone a phone. Dropping the screen from a wrist device would not keep the watch a watch — it would create a second, narrower product beside it, which is a different kind of change and a different kind of risk.

If you are choosing a watch in the next few weeks, this changes nothing about that decision. It is worth knowing chiefly because it tells you Apple does not consider the category settled. For what the current hardware already does, and what its health notifications actually mean, see our earlier piece on what the Apple Watch's hypertension notifications really do.