Reportedly, the upcoming Apple Watch will receive its first significant Processor update in years

Theoretically, the Apple Watch receives a CPU upgrade every year. The Apple Watch Series 8 has an Apple S8 CPU, which is more powerful than the S7 SoC or S6 SoC that were included with the Series 7 and Series 6, respectively.

They all appear to use an identical processor with a CPU design based on the Apple 13 (likely the compact, energy-efficient cores), and a 7 nm manufacturing process from TSMC. Unfortunately, none of those CPUs has actually offered anything in the way of a performance improvement.

According to Mark Gurman of Bloomberg (via MacRumors), this year will be unique. He claims that the upcoming chip (probably the Apple S9) will represent a more significant update than the previous ones, featuring a new processor built using the same architecture as Apple’s more recent A15 chip. Additionally, if the CPU is changing, Apple might use this as an opportunity to improve the manufacturing process, which might result in a faster device with improved battery life (and other features).

Gurman doesn’t anticipate significant design changes for the watch this year, and we can probably expect it to look about the same as every Apple Watch introduced since 2018’s Series 4 design increased the screen sizes. A new chip would likely be the most interesting aspect of the next-generation Apple Watch’s hardware. Gurman anticipates a fairly significant update to the watchOS software this year, with a new user experience built around iOS-style widgets.

The advantage of maintaining the CPU essentially unchanged for so long is that a newer watchOS should operate equally well on watch hardware from multiple generations rather than needing the most cutting-edge chip to shine. It’s too soon to say if the watchOS 10 update will remove any earlier models, but watchOS 9 ended the suffering of the Apple Watch Series 3, albeit not before software updates became a huge hassle.