Apple Explains Why watchOS 27 Drops Support for So Many Models

[BigMcGuire]

I care about telling the time, weather, sleep tracking, workout tracking, some basic notications... as long as those things still work when I lose iOS 27 I'm fine with losing Siri. I've never used Siri to this day except to start a timer. The only thing I ask for is my watch doesn't run like **** every time there's any update.

Yep, starting cooking timers and reminders LOL.

 

[johnsawyercjs]

Yep, starting cooking timers and reminders LOL.

It's th' space age!

 

[loekf]

Can we get watchOS 27 just in EU for unsupported models, since Siri AI is not going to be supported? 😀

Exactly. Running AI is a lame excuse. I don't wasnt/need AI on a watch. The processing is done on the iPhone or cloud anyways.

 

[123]

They're not only supporting it for 3 years. There will be more than a few years of security updates.

I just don't understand this "If I can't run the very latest software the device is obsolete" thinking. It's weird. People say apple is forcing you to buy a new device. Nope. *YOU* are forcing yourself to buy a new device. I still have use a 2019 iMac that I use *every day*. It's stuck on sequoia. But it's still gotten 3 security updates this year. Works perfectly fine. Up until last year i had a nearly 10 year old iPad Pro. I'd still have it except someone decided it needed to be a new prototype foldable iPad...

The notion that a device is immediately obsolete the moment it doesn't get the latest OS is nonsense. And it'd not apple doing it. It's you.

This would be true if Apple didn't lock down the system. And on top of that Apple deciding at any point that this is the system you're going to be stuck with forever, like unusable watchos 26. There should be at least the option to downgrade if you can't run the fixed OS version.

Also, only few people are talking about the watch being obsolete. Most are just talking about Apple deliberately leaving the watch behind to sell new hardware. Even though most changes have nothing to do with updated hardware. It is about greed only.

 

[macduke]

Aren't those the same generations that basically had the same SoC that they still renamed each year? One of the reasons I held out on the Ultra 1 for the Ultra 2 and I'm glad I did.

But I don't get their reasoning. Isn't anything AI related handed off to the iPhone already? Don't see what in their example about asking Siri for ingredients is something that can't be done on any existing watch. It's just a pass-through. Even if they're on cellular without their iPhone, can't it just be handed off to the cloud for most queries?

Obviously the real reason is they need a reason to get older Apple Watch users to upgrade. If anything, this shows that the new Apple Watch this year is likely to be a lot of the same old same old with very little in the way of changes or innovation. Hell, I've been waiting so long for blood glucose monitoring to come to Apple Watch that I don't even need it anymore because medical science has advanced far enough into this future that I don't even need to worry about it anymore, I can just take a once per week injection of tirzepatide which pushes me out of that borderline, pre-diabetic category that I've wavered near, while keeping my weight in check and improving my cardiovascular health.

 

[p96]

waiting so long for blood glucose monitoring to come to Apple Watch that I don't even need it anymore

Whenever it comes, it would still be good for people who are not yet aware they are becoming diabetic... or encouraging people to not eat so much sweets. It might even help people connect their weather-influenced eating patterns to how they feel instead of saying the rain makes their joints ache.

 

[visualseed]

Or, “buy a normal watch that never needs updates and you never need to dispose of”

You don't need a watch at all if your town still has a sundial in the main square

 

[aliensporebomb]

Yeh… it’s a time to get a new Garmin Watch. It will be more reliable than Apple Watch.

In what way more reliable? If you're getting the Phenix series you need a deeper pocketbook than the Apple Ultra.

 

[aliensporebomb]

I keep hearing about how IOS26 is so unusable but I've been using it since it came out and my watch never once crashed or failed to function. So what's the IOS26 "unusable" comments?

 

[Ant.honey]

Nothing bodes well for Apple lately.. They need to offer good trade-ins ( I have a 6 and an SE 2) and they need to solve the battery problem. If you’re going to discontinue support, give me a huge discount on a new one.

 

[aliensporebomb]

I keep hearing about how IOS26 is so unusable but I've been using it since it came out and my watch never once crashed or failed to function. So what's the IOS26 "unusable" comments?

I'm waiting...

 

[gnomeisland]

This is unlikely to be the limitation. The core difference between arm64_32 and arm64 lies in pointer size. Both use the same 64-bit execution state and registers, but arm64_32 strips pointer sizes down to 32 bits to save memory. arm64_32 has max 4 GB RAM per app and arm64 has in the hundreds of gigabytes.

They'd need that memory if Apple were putting an Large Language Model (LLM) directly on the watch... but here's the thing, Apple is not putting a fully standalone, on-device LLM inside the Apple Watch for watchOS 27.

They aren't putting an LLM but even with prior versions of WatchOS the supported watches did on-device speech-to-text via the scaled down NPU. I imagine the NPU is the real differentiator.