by Dan Moren

September 11, 2026 5:52 AM PT

Your Apple Watch isn’t recording audio, it’s flowing it

The Internet’s Dr. Drang on the Live Rewind and Siri Recap features announced this week:

The hoops Apple jumped through to avoid certain words is pretty funny. For example, in the discussion of Live Rewind, we learn that

Audio from the microphone flows into the audio buffer inside the Secure Exclave on the S11 chip.

You think your watch records the audio around you? No no no. The audio flows into the Secure Enclave, and flowing is definitely not recording because it’s a different word.

Notably Apple chose not to use a very common synonym for “flowing” that would be instantly understandable to most, because no doubt it did not like the implications of that word. So I guess it depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.¹

Also worth noting that the Siri Recap feature, unlike Live Rewind, does not even bother to alert people around you that recording—sorry, flowing—is happening, using similar linguistic hopscotch. From Apple’s own privacy document:

There is no audible signal because no raw audio is retained, and there is no way to reconstruct the original audio from a Siri Recap or share raw audio with anyone.

The implication obviously being only raw audio could even be considered a privacy violation. That’s an interesting way of framing it, even though I’m pretty sure there are people who would be upset to know that their conversations are being summarized even if audio is not being retained.

Glenn has already done a thorough and even-handed rundown of this feature, but I think Dr. Drang’s point about the lengths to which Apple has to contort itself to make it seem like this feature is on the up-and-up is, in and of itself, telling.