Apple's 2026 watches keep the case and the screen they already have. Mark Gurman has Series 12 and Ultra 4 in late-stage testing with no design overhaul planned for either, and what goes in instead is a faster chip and better health tracking.
Cycle Tracking, the period-logging feature in Apple's Health app, already gained perimenopause and menopause support in watchOS 27, the watch software the company showed in June. It notifies users aged 40 and older when their logged patterns suggest perimenopause. Apple says those notifications are not meant to replace a diagnosis.
A new high blood pressure notification feature is under review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, per DigiTimes, and that agency has to clear a health claim before Apple can make it. Nobody has described how the feature would differ from the hypertension notifications the watch already sends.
New sleep metrics, including time in bed, turned up in a leaked internal build and are slated for iOS 28, two software releases away, per Macworld. Project Mulberry, the AI health coaching service Apple has been building, was scaled back after its group changed hands, and Gurman does not expect anything from it before later in the iOS 27 cycle. Neither one lands on a 2026 watch.
Oversight of non-invasive glucose monitoring, the long-running effort to read blood sugar without a needle, moved this year from Tim Millet, who runs platform architecture, to Zongjian Chen, who runs advanced technologies.
At least one high-end model gets eight sensors arranged in a ring on its underside, per a DigiTimes supply-chain report from August 2025. The leaker Kosutami says one health sensor is injection-moulded into a silicone band, and only silicone, because Apple has not worked out how to put the hardware into any other material.
Cycle Tracking shipped in June. The eight-sensor ring was first described in August 2025.