Review: Apple Watch Series 7

Under the guise of working very, very hard to test Apple’s latest smartwatch, the Series 7, I’ve spent a lot of time biking over the past two weeks. Nearly all the new additions revolve around making it more bike-friendly, with improved fall detection algorithms for cycling and the ability to more accurately measure calories burned while riding an electric bike versus a regular bike. Plus, this Apple Watch is more dust-resistant than ever and has stronger glass protecting the screen.

These bike-friendly features are excellent. I have plenty of electric and analog bikes to test it with, and I've found that the Series 7 auto-detects either as Outdoor Cycling very swiftly. It auto-pauses and resumes too, allowing me to run errands while biking around my neighborhood.

But after trying to parse the different cycling workouts in Apple’s Fitness app, I started to realize that the new algorithm … doesn’t really matter. Ebiking is tremendously variable, by design. Just like on a regular bike, you can shift up or down, and you can toggle electric assistance on or off. You can amble on an analog bike to the store, or ride a mini ebike in the skate park. If you’re not riding an electric bike next to someone riding an analog bike, making a direct comparison is really hard.

That’s how I feel about most of the improvements on the Apple Watch Series 7. I can see how they would be useful, but in real life, the utility of those improvements is limited to fewer and fewer people. It’s not that the Series 7 is bad. Certainly, it’s better to make incremental improvements to a beloved piece of hardware rather than shoehorn in new features just for the sake of novelty. Still, that makes reviews much less exciting.

Photograph: Apple

This year, the aluminum case comes in four new, updated colors—midnight (which appears to be more dark-bluish than black), starlight, green, and blue. I picked starlight, which has a slightly pinkish silver tone that would go very well with the new pink iPad Mini.

The standout feature is an updated display. It’s 20 percent bigger than the Series 6 display with smaller bezels around the screen. Placed next to my 40-mm Series 6, the case of the 41-mm Series 7 doesn’t look noticeably larger. The screen itself, however, is bigger and brighter.

Apple’s proprietary faces emphasize the smaller bezels. But if you ask me, the best way to take advantage of every speck of real estate is to set a portrait photo as your watch face on that bright, brilliant display. Apple’s new Contour face, which squishes the hour marks on a watch face right up to the edge of the bezel, looks ridiculous. No one tells time like that.

The Series 7 has a new refractive edge that makes the display appear to wrap around the case. This is kind of neat. I can definitely see the Series 7’s display at far more oblique angles than the Series 6’s. I thought I might use it for Fitness+ workouts, but it turns out that I still have to turn my wrist to see anything useful. It’s mainly just to assure yourself that the watch is on and recording your workouts.

The bigger display also has one big advantage: a full QWERTY keyboard with QuickPath, which allows you to type by sliding your finger instead of trying to peck at a tiny spot. It makes it much easier to text on the watch. I definitely still relied on my phone for most responses, but it was much easier to type quick responses while helping my kids with snacks or in the bathroom.

Photograph: Apple

The Apple Watch is still the best wearable of its kind. The health features are incredibly comprehensive. It can track your sleep—it accurately recorded when my 4-year-old woke me up in the middle of the night—as well as your sleeping respiratory rate. And it can correctly track your workouts; the speed and distance measurements for my daily runs were consistent with measurements from my Garmin, as were my VO2 max results.

It measures sound levels to see if they’re safe for your ears, and walking asymmetry to determine if you may have health issues on the horizon. It’s not a medical device, but it can also take an electrocardiogram, and the SpO2 measurements are accurate (and verified with a fingertip pulse oximeter).

The problem? The Series 7 has purportedly faster charging this time around, but the battery life is still abysmal. Unlike the Series 6, it does make it through a full day. But with an always-on display, two tracked workouts, and sleep tracking, I wake up with the battery at 15 percent or lower and need to charge it for about an hour. That's annoying if your only time to fit in a workout is before work.

When considering any Apple product, you have to consider the entire ecosystem in which it lives. There is just no other wearable that can provide all the services the Apple Watch does within the company's walled garden. I don’t particularly like Fitness+. It still doesn't have an equivalent to the quick bodyweight workouts I like from Peloton. But it is convenient that the workouts show up seamlessly on my iPad and my watch.

Apple also added biking directions last year, so I can now get these on the watch rather than having to pull out my phone. What with tracking workouts, getting directions to pick up something from a friend’s house, responding to messages, controlling the music in my headphones, and covertly admiring my kid’s picture in the always-on watch face, it’s no surprise the battery doesn’t last that long. 

I've worn an Apple Watch for years, but I'm barely scratching the surface of apps that make the Watch an indispensable tool. If you’re trying to ditch your phone, spending a lot of time outside, or are especially excited for your wrist accessory to match your new iPad Mini, the Series 7 is worth it. The bigger display is great for displaying photos and for texting. But if you have a Series 5 or 6, you can probably wait another year.