Nearly two years ago today, I unboxed the Apple Watch Series 7 here on ShortCircuit,
and in comparison to my Series 3, I was convinced I needed an upgrade.
So when the Series 8 came out, I bought myself one. Now I'm here unboxing the Apple Watch Series 9, and I'm interested to see if I have similar thoughts.
Last time I unboxed this, completely wrong, and so I hope I'm doing it justice this time
by doing it properly. Oh, it's so beautiful.
So for Series 9, they've released the traditional aluminum cases in colors that we've seen before,
midnight, starlight, silver, and red, but a new addition is the pink color, which I have here.
They also offer stainless steel options. Wow, I do really like this sort of baby pink.
It's similar to the iPhone 15, which I recently unboxed here on ShortCircuit as well.
Something cool to mention is that when you buy the aluminum case and the sport loop band,
these are carbon neutral, which is, in my opinion, quite a big step for Apple.
My only gripe, however, is this is the only combination that is carbon neutral.
Aside from that, if you get a different case type or a different band type, it won't be.
I love these sport loop bands too, and we also have the new braided cable,
but this one is USB-C, similar to the Series 7 and 8.
It's so nice seeing packaging that's entirely paper.
That's something that we try to do here within Creator Warehouse,
and it's cool seeing a lot larger companies also kind of following that trend.
Although paper isn't necessarily good for the environment either, it is better than plastic,
so I'll try not to hit the TV this time.
I hit it every time!
I swear, every time I unbox an Apple Watch, it's always a different style band.
Set up as a new Apple Watch. Continue. Let's try this again.
Last time I had the exact same issue, and we ended up having to use Jono's phone to pair it.
It's just always chaos with me. I don't understand.
Yay! It's connected. I would love to see one day somebody like walking around with two Apple Watches on their wrist.
So the first thing to know is the display. The display is 2,000 nits, which in comparison to the 1,000 nits of the 8, it's quite the upgrade.
For something like answering and reading messages when you're out in the sun,
maybe at the beach, or just out and about in the summertime,
I think that improvement can make a huge difference. However, with that said, similarly to its predecessors,
this series has a 326 pixel per inch display.
A look over the body, we have the digital crown similar to the previous models,
which takes you to your applications, and if you double tap the digital crown,
it will take you to your recently used apps. Obviously, I haven't used any, so there are none here.
But once you're getting to know your Apple Watch, this is super convenient.
We also have the side button, which takes you to your control center,
or if you press and hold, it will take you to the emergency,
and the on and off. The series 9 has an S9 dual core CPU with 5.6 billion transistors,
that is 60% more than the series 8. Along with this, they've also upgraded the neural processing engine to have four cores
instead of two, which we saw with the previous model. With this upgrade, we've seen new benefits.
For example, Siri has been improved to be on device.
This is super awesome when it comes to things like setting alarms, or taking notes,
anything where you don't need to connect to the internet or have cellular service,
she can do. Let's try it. Set an alarm for 5.30pm.
Make a note to tell me I need to grab cheese when I get groceries.
Sorry, I can't help you with notes on Apple Watch.
Let me redact that statement. It doesn't work for notes.
It does work for, oh, and starting workouts.
What if I'm going to yoga? Start yoga workout.
Beautiful.
I want to do yoga now. Oh.
And also dictation is 25% more accurate.
Similarly to the iPhone 15, they've also integrated the generation 2 ultra wide band chip,
which allows for more precise find my.
I would love to try it out because I didn't get a chance to do that
previously when I was unboxing the 15, but now I can use my watch to find my iPhone.
Okay, here, take this. Put it somewhere, hide it from me.
So I'll go to find my while he's running away with the phone.
Open find my.
Pardon me, Apple? Sign into iCloud.
It's just an endless cycle of you need to do this before you could do this.
Am I not going to be able to try find my again for the second ShortCircuit?
Oh, there. Okay, let's let's go.
I'm just stupid. Let's go. Look at that.
That's pretty, pretty handy. Oh, wow. Oh, that is really cool. I didn't.
Yeah. Okay. It seems like we're going to wait and set. Let's see if there's anything.
I hear it. Is it in the drawer? Do it again.
Oh, there she is. Oh, good job.
She's been found.
I will say that was much easier than the find my that I've been using with air tags on my iPhone 12.
So it's definitely been an upgrade. The gesture.
Okay. One of the biggest upgrades they wanted to mention was double tap.
I don't have a chance to try it out today because unfortunately it didn't launch with the Apple Watch
and we have to wait until the upgrade. Oh, is it? We can upgrade to the beta.
Okay. Beta updates. To install the update Apple Watch must be connected to its charger and charged to at least 50%.
Battery is at 39%. We're doing our own little science experiment and seeing how long it takes to charge from 39% to 50%.
Set a stopwatch.
Oh, me too. Yeah.
Meditate for eight hours. Get heart rate down to zero.
14 minutes and 11 seconds it took for it to charge from 39% to 50% and then update to the beta.
The most notable upgrade of the series nine, the new double tap gesture,
which essentially acts as like your primary button so you can use it to answer phone calls,
reply to text messages, pause and play music, etc.
Not me questioning myself. While doing my series seven unboxing, I tried out a feature that Apple calls assistive touch.
It essentially allows you to use your Apple Watch with one hand by setting up gestures,
such as clench, which then trigger a certain action.
Apple says that the double tap is so complex that it requires the four-core neural processing
engine in order to detect it. Gestures. There we are.
Double tap is on. Oh, there we are.
Okay. That's cool.
Then how do I, how do I choose one? Let's try the stopwatch.
Go. Okay, it's working and stop.
It takes a little bit of time to react to the gesture. Roughly a second and 50 milliseconds to react, which isn't necessarily ideal if you're trying
to accurately track something that you're timing, like a run maybe.
It's doing nothing. So far, not that impressed.
I'm honestly surprised that when you go into the gestures thing, it doesn't say like,
hey, this is what this gesture will do.
What the heck? Is it only through Apple music?
Does anybody have Apple music? For a feature that's been widely talked about, it didn't work as well as I had hoped.
That delay thing really, really gets me.
And hopefully with the new version, it will be less significant.
But for now, let's just wait and see what Apple has in store for us.
Another hardware thing to note is similar to every other standard Apple watch.
The battery life continues to stay at an estimated 18 hours.
But when it comes to storage, they've actually increased it to 64 gigabytes,
whereas the Series 8 had half as much with 32 gigabytes.
Now for my final thoughts. Similar to my iPhone 15 unboxing, I don't necessarily think that these new additions
justify an upgrade from a Series 6 onwards.
But if you have a Series 3 or a Series 4, this would be an awesome upgrade.
So at the end of the day, it's up to you. The standard aluminum models start at $399 USD.
And if you're looking to upgrade to a more premium option like the stainless steel,
those will start at $699 USD.
That was easy. I think going 100% carbon neutral is a great direction for Apple.
And that's the thing, I hope that they push more. If you're interested in watching another Apple Watch video,
I would recommend watching my Series 7 Apple Watch video
or more recently, Nick did an unboxing of the Series 2 Ultra.
So go check those out. Subscribe to ShortCircuit and thanks for watching.
Bye. My Series 7 is my daytime watch and my Series 9 is my nighttime watch.