By Jason Snell

One week with Apple Watch Series 12 (and just getting started)

I’ve been using the Apple Watch Series 12 for a week now, but this isn’t a review. The first wave of reviews that dropped at embargo time were all from people who had used the device for about the same amount of time, and it seems a bit silly to just repeat those observations—and a week after all of those stories were published. In addition, the most tantalizing features of the new Apple Watch—Live Rewind and Siri Recap—won’t be available until “late 2026.”¹

So instead of sprinting to a quick judgment, I’ve decided to take the long path and live with the Series 12. I migrated from my own Series 10 watch, transferred my cellular plan over, and have committed to wearing it most of the time, including when I sleep. (While I tried out Apple’s sleep features the last time I reviewed an Apple Watch, I decided I didn’t really get enough benefit out of it to keep it going—but since Apple really wants me to wear the watch when I sleep, I will do so, at least for now. That way I can at least try the Vitals app, which runs in daytime mode now.)

Since I’m coming from a Series 10, I’m unfortunately not able to be impressed by how thin the Series 12 is—since the Series 10 was really the watch that got noticeably thinner. (If you’re thinking of upgrading from an older watch than Series 10, though, you’ll love it.) I’m curious to see how the watch face holds up compared to the older model, since the aluminum Series 12 has picked up Ceramic Shield 2 protection.

All summer I complained about just how sluggish the new Siri AI functionality felt in watchOS 27 on my Series 10. Obviously the watch isn’t really capable of full-on Apple Intelligence, but it’s able to phone home to its paired iPhone and relay queries made from that device, and the result is that I can stand in my kitchen and ask what temperature is right for the immersion cooker to cook tonight’s chicken, and get an answer—something that would have required me to go search on my phone before. The results aren’t iPhone fast, but they’re generally fast enough, and have the improved information density that Siri AI offers.

It does feel like Apple tightened up Siri AI responsiveness right at the end of the OS beta cycle, which is especially important when it comes to basic functions that shouldn’t require a laborious trip to an iPhone or cloud servers. Now, when I start a timer, it picks the command up pretty fast. All summer I was frustrated by the seeming inability of my watch or my iPhone to add items to Reminders lists via Siri, but that problem seems to have finally abated, which is important, since that kind of quick data capture is one of my primary Apple Watch use cases. No amount of Siri AI goodness will be worth it if you can’t properly set a timer or add a reminder from your wrist.

While I can’t rewind 15 seconds of recent conversation or check the notes on a meeting that was being monitored by my watch, I was able to use another of Apple’s “Audio Intelligence” features, which is near-instant song identification via Shazam. I suspect this is all about timing. Since this Apple Watch is apparently always buffering audio, when I’m curious about the identity of a song, it’s got the ability to use its buffer and extend the window it needs for analysis. For Shazam, this can often be the difference between success and failure—often, the most recognizable part of a song is what prompts me to want to look it up, and by the time I bring up Shazam, the moment has passed and the song is ending or the conversation in the café has picked up and I end up unsatisfied.

I was watching “Ted Lasso” the other night, and as the music at the very end of the episode began to play, I realized I was curious about the artist. With a very quick flip of the Digital Crown, I exposed the Shazam widget, which had already identified the song and was displaying it for me. There’s a plus icon there that you can use to add that song to your log for later reference.

It’s not going to change my life, but it’s a great little feature. My only real complaint about it is that if Apple’s going to let you use Siri Recap to monitor your life, I’d kind of like the option of turning on a Shazam log for an extended period of time. A few months ago, my wife and I were in a café in Portland, Oregon early on a Sunday morning, and the playlist perfectly fit the mood. I would have loved to have been able to just tell my watch to log all the songs it could identify until we left the café, or for some duration of time.

It’s a start. There’s much more to be done—by me, in terms of using it, and by Apple, in terms of shipping all the features it has promised for this hardware but was unable to deliver by launch.

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