Apple Watch Series 12 brings the S11 chip and redesigned health sensors
The watch keeps its design but changes its chip and sensors to measure health more often and prepare for Audio Intelligence.
The Apple Watch Series 12 keeps the design, buttons, sizes and sensor types of earlier Apple Watches. What changes is inside.
Two hardware updates set it apart: the S11 chip and a redesigned health sensor array. The S11 has a faster CPU, GPU and Neural Engine, plus a Secure Exclave that buffers and processes raw audio on the processor itself.
The new sensor array does not capture new kinds of data, but measures health metrics more frequently, more accurately and with less power. Its EKG electrodes are larger for better skin contact, the photodiodes are reconfigured to catch reflected light, and the optical LEDs are larger and less power-hungry.
Those changes enable more frequent heart rate sampling, a new readiness score and Audio Intelligence. Two of the four Audio Intelligence features are available now: faster Shazam and Sound Recognition. Siri Recaps and Live Rewind, which use the microphone to produce notifications, transcripts or summaries of nearby sounds and speech, arrive later this year. The watch also adds new gesture support, a revived Ceramic case and improved battery performance.
