Apple Watch Series 10 fumbles the AI potential it could’ve owned

The iPhone 16 is perhaps the slightest year-on-year upgrade in the iPhone's history, but I still had high hopes for the 10th edition of the Apple Watch. A decade of minor routine changes to the smartwatch leads one to expect a major design overhaul along the lines of the iPhone X.

That, as you know, wasn't the case with the Apple Watch Series 10. Still, Apple could’ve marked the watch’s 10th anniversary in a big way with Apple Intelligence, turning it into a futuristic sci-fi gadget that even James Bond would coolly use on his missions. Unfortunately, Apple dropped the ball in more ways than one.

Forget about the Apple Watch X

It’s just the plain-old Apple Watch Series 10

Apple quite literally celebrated the iPhone’s 10th anniversary by flaunting a novel phone with its screen stretching from corner to corner along with a sophisticated facial recognition system. In doing so with the iPhone X, Apple set expectations for what could’ve been the Apple Watch X sporting an all-new design — something different from what we’ve seen over the years.

Nobody expected Apple to launch a smartwatch with a circular dial, as that would be too off-brand for Apple. However, the rumored flat sides and other niceties like a micro-LED display seemed quite plausible.

What we actually got at Apple’s September event is a watch that is just an iterative upgrade and nothing substantially different from any of the previous Apple Watches, at least visually. Interestingly, we also got a glimpse at the revival of Apple’s obsession with slimness that started with the iPad Pro, with the iPhone being the next victim.

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The perfect +1 AI device

The rabbit can humanely go back to its burrow

For me, my smartwatch is a tool that helps me reduce unnecessary phone use. Companies are pitching AI along similar lines as it begins to do stuff on your behalf, enabling you to spend less time staring at a screen. While the tech world is scrambling to make standalone AI devices specifically for that purpose, it forgets that a suitable device to fill the gap already exists, and you probably have it on your wrist right now.

The existing crop of AI devices like those from Rabbit and Humane are typically barebones with little processing power of their own. They simply relay your voice commands to the cloud where the actual processing and execution happens. For instance, Rabbit actually takes in-app actions like a human would in the cloud when you ask the Rabbit R1 to do something.

But the Apple Watch has far more mature hardware and already does a lot of the processing on its own, without even relying on the companion iPhone. And without any learning curve, a smartwatch is already a fantastic +1 device for your phone that only needs to come to speed with AI. That shouldn’t be too difficult, should it?

The hardware roadblock

Non-iPhone 15 Pro users were left quite miffed when they learned that Apple Intelligence wouldn’t make it to their phones, not due to its age as it's only a year old, but due to hardware limitations.

AI needs a lot of processing power and memory to function offline in the background, and the iPhone 15 doesn’t have enough RAM – we're talking 6GB of memory vs. 8GB on the iPhone 15 Pro, which is eligible for Apple Intelligence. When Apple says it has designed the iPhone 16 series from the ground up for AI, it means it has included 8GB of RAM across the board for both Pro and non-Pro models.

Comparing that to a smartwatch would be quite silly, but I’m ready to bear the shame for the sake of science. The Apple Watch Series 9 from last year had 1GB of RAM, and it’s safe to assume that the latest model shares the same memory capacity as well. Even though the new S10 processor on the Watch Series 10 has a beefier four-core neural engine, it is just not made to run AI on-device like an iPhone.

Smartwatches are, anyway, a tough playground with so much tech packed inside a tiny body that it's hard to make them do more than they already can. That’s why even the Pixel Watch 3 didn’t get any meaningful Gemini features, while the Galaxy Watch 7 has a basic AI feature to give you a health summary, but nothing more.

That being said, bringing AI to smartwatches shouldn’t be that difficult with current hardware. During this year’s WWDC, Apple touted a cloud processing mechanism for your AI queries that is as secure and private as on-device processing. Your Apple Watch can already serve Siri questions, so a cloud relay for standalone use and offloading the heavy lifting to the iPhone when it’s nearby are some possibilities Apple could’ve explored with the Series 10.

Perhaps Apple needed more time to figure out how these frequent online queries would impact your Watch’s data plan and its already single-day battery life.

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Apple Watch is primed for the job

But Apple fumbled this year

The arrival of the refreshed Wear OS has overturned the fate of all modern Android smartwatches, with so many great options to choose from. But its fragmentation is also its biggest bane, which is why you will find Apple Watches on more wrists than any of its peers. With the kind of influence Apple has on the tech world, it could’ve shown how smartwatches are the perfect AI companion devices that you already own and use.

But Apple didn’t even mention AI and the Watch Series 10 in the same sentence at the launch. How could it when it has put itself in an embarrassing muddle by shipping iPhone 16 series phones without Apple Intelligence, their widely exhibited, highlighted feature?

Even when the Apple Intelligence rollout starts in October, many of the notable features, including those Siri changes, will still be a few months away. Only after that will Apple possibly be able to bring Apple Intelligence to its smartwatches.