Apple smartwatches have been expanded with important capabilities, but unfortunately they are far from available to everyone.
Last September, the Cupertino native unveiled the current generation of Apple Watch smartwatches in the form of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2, which brought more solid improvements to the lineup, including the Apple S9 chipset. In recent days, there’s been some movement around Apple wristwatches again, as Apple recently made available an update to the watchOS 10.2 operating system, which provides the voice-based assistant Siri with a useful new functionality, but unfortunately only and exclusively for owners of the latest models.
It is precisely the recording of data that can be collected in the Health app, which can now be done via Siri, that is not only welcome from a convenience point of view, but also improves accessibility. It’s no wonder many people have asked this question: If older smartwatches also have Siri and the Health app, why do only Series 9 and Ultra 2 support this function?
Product Marketing Manager at Apple Recently CNETHe conducted an interview withjustifying the decision by saying that only the new Watch models equipped with the S9 processor are powerful enough to process Siri commands to record health-related data directly on the device with minimal latency.
The latter is essential because it is the only way to ensure that such sensitive user data remains safe. This was also confirmed by Kate Skinner, head of data protection at Apple, who also participated in the conversation, according to which principles such as minimizing data movement and transparency were followed during the implementation of the Siri + Health function.
Only Apple knows whether outperforming the S9 chip or making new smartwatches more attractive is the reason for Siri’s limited health functionality. However, the company did not provide raw performance difference values when introducing the new processor, saying only that the S9 contains 60% more transistors than the previous model S8, while the GPU has 30% more for artificial intelligence. tasks, and the responsible neural drive is twice as fast.
