Apple announced the Apple Watch Series 12 at its September 9th launch event, with Siri AI-powered Audio Intelligence as the highlight features. The new abilities include a Live Rewind feature that allows users to replay the last 15 seconds of recently detected audio and view a text transcript of it on their watch by double-pressing on its Digital Crown button. There’s also a Siri Recap feature that uses “ambient listening” to take notes on audio from your watch, with summaries in the Siri app.
The Live Rewind and Siri Recap features will be available in beta later this year on both the Watch Series 12 and Watch Ultra 4, in English at first.
The new watch is powered by a new S11 chip and comes in space gray, black, gold and bronze, as well as black and white ceramic. It starts at $399 and launches September 18th, with preorders starting today. It will also be available through the Apple Upgrade leasing program with 12- and 24-month leases starting at $11.99 per month.
The Series 12 also features some health upgrades with new optical and electrical heart sensors that now support continuous background heart rate sensing with readings taken every 5 seconds, 60 times more than before, and now include support for perimenopause and menopause in the Cycle Tracking experience.
Last year’s Series 11, which also launched at $399 with 42mm and 46mm sizes, added 5G, hypertension monitoring, a Sleep Score feature, stronger Ion-X glass, and improved battery life. It was also Apple’s slimmest smartwatch to date when it was announced, measuring 9.7mm thick.
The launch also follows a wave of price hikes earlier this year that impacted nearly all of Apple’s products, although not its smartwatches — the Apple Watch has consistently started at $399 for several years now.