Some new Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 owners say their watches are restarting on their own. The screen goes to the Apple logo, the watch reboots, and whatever you were doing is gone. MacRumors' Tim Hardwick collected the reports on Monday, three days after both watches went on sale.
About 30 owners have posted about random reboots in the MacRumors forums so far. Similar posts have turned up on Reddit and in Apple's own support community. Apple hasn't acknowledged any of it.
Owners describe restarts while using Siri AI, editing a watch face, opening Maps or the App Store, starting a phone call and recording a workout. Some say it happened while the watch was just sitting there.
At least four owners have shared full panic logs, and those logs all show the same thing. The Apple Neural Engine, the part of the chip that runs on-device AI work, appears to hang for around two seconds. A firmware watchdog then decides the watch has frozen and forces a kernel panic, which is what restarts it.
Owners who wiped their watches and set them up as new report the same reboots, and the crashes show up on the original watchOS 27.0 build and on the day-one update the watches download during setup. One Series 12 owner told MacRumors a replacement unit hit the same Neural Engine panic.
That one owner's replacement failing the same way points away from one bad watch. It doesn't tell you whether the fix is software or something deeper, and nobody outside Apple knows that yet.
Thirty forum posts is a handful against however many watches shipped on Friday, and people with a working watch don't post about it.
These are also the first watches in several years with an overhauled processor, the chip behind new Audio Intelligence features like Siri Recap and Live Rewind.
If you've just bought one and it's rebooting, you're not alone. Keep your receipt, and watch for the first watchOS 27 update. If your watch is behaving, there's nothing here to act on.
We'll update this when Apple says something.