Apple Watch Ultra 4: First impressions
Apple Watch Ultra 4 doesn't change what the Ultra line looks like on your wrist, but it changes what it knows about you while it's there. Apple has refreshed its Watch Ultra lineup with the launch of all new Apple Watch Ultra 4 at the company’s ’Surprise Shine’ event on September 9. Successor to the Apple Watch Ultra 3 , the Ultra 4 feature new Health Sensing System , which claims to provide the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable, powerful insights including readiness and longer battery life. We had the chance to spend some time with the Apple Watch Ultra 4, and here are our initial impressions of Apple’s latest rugged wearable.
DesignApple Watch Ultra 4 keeps the rugged, unmistakable Ultra silhouette, available in the same natural and black titanium finishes as before. It's a design Apple has clearly settled on as the right one for its most durable watch, and there's no attempt to reinvent it here — the case still feels substantial on the wrist without tipping into cumbersome, and the titanium build continues to feel like it's genuinely built for the outdoors rather than just styled to look like it.
The band lineup gets a proper refresh this year. Trail Loop adds dark umber, sand, and burgundy options, while Alpine Loop picks up desert, dark olive, and burgundy. The most interesting material change is on the Ocean Band, now made from a unique translucent silicone available in translucent gray, translucent kelp, and translucent black — a genuinely different look from the solid-colour bands Apple has offered in the past, and one that feels distinctly suited to the Ultra's adventure-sport identity. For Hermès buyers, the collection adds a striking new Grand H titanium band with a built-in extension mechanism that lets it stretch to fit over a wet suit — a small but thoughtful detail for anyone actually using the watch the way Apple markets it.
DisplayApple didn't make display technology the headline story with Ultra 4, and that continues a trend from recent Ultra generations — the large, bright, titanium-wrapped display that's made the Ultra legible in direct sunlight and usable with gloves on remains the foundation here. Where the display does become more useful this year is through software: a new heart rate watch face complication surfaces real-time heart rate data at a glance, and a new Steps complication does the same for step count, both readable instantly without opening a separate app. The Smart Stack also becomes more capable, with contextual suggestions — like a parked-car reminder from Maps — surfacing directly on screen, plus a new single-handed tap gesture for selecting individual widgets without needing a free hand.
Features and performanceThis is where Apple Watch Ultra 4 makes its real case for an upgrade. At the core is Apple's new Health Sensing System paired with the S11 chip, which Apple says delivers the most accurate heart rate sensing of any wearable currently available — validated in a study spanning more than 1,000 participants against competing devices. In daily use, the most noticeable change is frequency: heart rate is now measured every five seconds, all day long, and heart rate variability is tracked up to 24 times more often than before, split into recovery HRV for day-to-day stress signals and overall HRV for broader cardiovascular insight.
That denser data stream feeds directly into readiness, the watch's headline new feature. Each day, Ultra 4 combines recent activity, training load, vitals, and sleep score into a single 0-10 score paired with a clear recommendation — Recover, Pace Yourself, Ready, or Go For It — and it updates in real time as new data comes in, whether that's from an intense workout or a shift in daytime vitals. For an audience of athletes and endurance competitors, having that kind of daily gut-check feels like a genuinely practical addition rather than just another number to track.
Battery life sees a substantial jump. Everyday use now stretches to up to 50 hours, and Low Power Mode extends that to as much as 84 hours — genuinely multi-day territory for a device this capable. Charging is also faster, with just 15 minutes on the charger adding up to 18 hours of battery back. For outdoor athletes specifically, the new Extended Workout mode delivers up to 25 hours of tracking with full GPS and heart rate data, a 25% jump over the previous model, while the new Max Extended Workout mode stretches that to 45 hours — enough, Apple notes, to track a full 100-mile race while still logging GPS readings every second. Step tracking has also been overhauled with new machine learning models, and Apple now claims it as the most accurate step tracking of any smartwatch, alongside claiming the most accurate on-device GPS in a sports watch.
The most forward-looking additions are the new Audio Intelligence features arriving later this year. Live Rewind lets you double-press the Digital Crown to instantly pull up the last 15 seconds of a conversation as text — genuinely useful mid-run or mid-hike when you half-catch something a training partner said. Siri Recap goes further, generating a title and key points from a conversation afterward for later review, and Sound Recognition extends accessibility features to the wrist, alerting users who are deaf or hard of hearing to sounds like sirens or alarms even without an iPhone nearby. Apple has clearly built privacy into these features from the ground up rather than adding it as an afterthought: audio is processed in an isolated hardware compartment on the S11 chip and immediately discarded, nothing is stored as a recording, and features like Live Rewind visibly and audibly signal to people nearby when they're active.
Layered on top is Siri AI, arriving with watchOS 27, bringing genuine personal context awareness to the wrist, accessible through a new Siri Modular watch face — a meaningful step up from Siri's previous, more limited capabilities on Apple Watch.
What we thinkApple Watch Ultra 4 doesn't ask you to fall in love with a new shape or a flashier screen — it asks you to trust that its sensors, battery, and software have all gotten meaningfully smarter since last year, and on that front, it delivers. The jump to five-second heart rate sensing, the introduction of readiness as an actual daily decision-making tool, and battery life stretching to 45 hours of full GPS tracking for ultra-endurance events are all substantial, practical improvements for the athletes and adventurers this watch is built for. For the complete analysis on the Watch Ultra 4 you will have to wait for our detailed review.
DesignApple Watch Ultra 4 keeps the rugged, unmistakable Ultra silhouette, available in the same natural and black titanium finishes as before. It's a design Apple has clearly settled on as the right one for its most durable watch, and there's no attempt to reinvent it here — the case still feels substantial on the wrist without tipping into cumbersome, and the titanium build continues to feel like it's genuinely built for the outdoors rather than just styled to look like it.
The band lineup gets a proper refresh this year. Trail Loop adds dark umber, sand, and burgundy options, while Alpine Loop picks up desert, dark olive, and burgundy. The most interesting material change is on the Ocean Band, now made from a unique translucent silicone available in translucent gray, translucent kelp, and translucent black — a genuinely different look from the solid-colour bands Apple has offered in the past, and one that feels distinctly suited to the Ultra's adventure-sport identity. For Hermès buyers, the collection adds a striking new Grand H titanium band with a built-in extension mechanism that lets it stretch to fit over a wet suit — a small but thoughtful detail for anyone actually using the watch the way Apple markets it.
DisplayApple didn't make display technology the headline story with Ultra 4, and that continues a trend from recent Ultra generations — the large, bright, titanium-wrapped display that's made the Ultra legible in direct sunlight and usable with gloves on remains the foundation here. Where the display does become more useful this year is through software: a new heart rate watch face complication surfaces real-time heart rate data at a glance, and a new Steps complication does the same for step count, both readable instantly without opening a separate app. The Smart Stack also becomes more capable, with contextual suggestions — like a parked-car reminder from Maps — surfacing directly on screen, plus a new single-handed tap gesture for selecting individual widgets without needing a free hand.
Features and performanceThis is where Apple Watch Ultra 4 makes its real case for an upgrade. At the core is Apple's new Health Sensing System paired with the S11 chip, which Apple says delivers the most accurate heart rate sensing of any wearable currently available — validated in a study spanning more than 1,000 participants against competing devices. In daily use, the most noticeable change is frequency: heart rate is now measured every five seconds, all day long, and heart rate variability is tracked up to 24 times more often than before, split into recovery HRV for day-to-day stress signals and overall HRV for broader cardiovascular insight.
That denser data stream feeds directly into readiness, the watch's headline new feature. Each day, Ultra 4 combines recent activity, training load, vitals, and sleep score into a single 0-10 score paired with a clear recommendation — Recover, Pace Yourself, Ready, or Go For It — and it updates in real time as new data comes in, whether that's from an intense workout or a shift in daytime vitals. For an audience of athletes and endurance competitors, having that kind of daily gut-check feels like a genuinely practical addition rather than just another number to track.
Battery life sees a substantial jump. Everyday use now stretches to up to 50 hours, and Low Power Mode extends that to as much as 84 hours — genuinely multi-day territory for a device this capable. Charging is also faster, with just 15 minutes on the charger adding up to 18 hours of battery back. For outdoor athletes specifically, the new Extended Workout mode delivers up to 25 hours of tracking with full GPS and heart rate data, a 25% jump over the previous model, while the new Max Extended Workout mode stretches that to 45 hours — enough, Apple notes, to track a full 100-mile race while still logging GPS readings every second. Step tracking has also been overhauled with new machine learning models, and Apple now claims it as the most accurate step tracking of any smartwatch, alongside claiming the most accurate on-device GPS in a sports watch.
The most forward-looking additions are the new Audio Intelligence features arriving later this year. Live Rewind lets you double-press the Digital Crown to instantly pull up the last 15 seconds of a conversation as text — genuinely useful mid-run or mid-hike when you half-catch something a training partner said. Siri Recap goes further, generating a title and key points from a conversation afterward for later review, and Sound Recognition extends accessibility features to the wrist, alerting users who are deaf or hard of hearing to sounds like sirens or alarms even without an iPhone nearby. Apple has clearly built privacy into these features from the ground up rather than adding it as an afterthought: audio is processed in an isolated hardware compartment on the S11 chip and immediately discarded, nothing is stored as a recording, and features like Live Rewind visibly and audibly signal to people nearby when they're active.
Layered on top is Siri AI, arriving with watchOS 27, bringing genuine personal context awareness to the wrist, accessible through a new Siri Modular watch face — a meaningful step up from Siri's previous, more limited capabilities on Apple Watch.
What we thinkApple Watch Ultra 4 doesn't ask you to fall in love with a new shape or a flashier screen — it asks you to trust that its sensors, battery, and software have all gotten meaningfully smarter since last year, and on that front, it delivers. The jump to five-second heart rate sensing, the introduction of readiness as an actual daily decision-making tool, and battery life stretching to 45 hours of full GPS tracking for ultra-endurance events are all substantial, practical improvements for the athletes and adventurers this watch is built for. For the complete analysis on the Watch Ultra 4 you will have to wait for our detailed review.
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