Apple Watch Series 9 vs Series 8

Apple deprecated the leather smartwatch straps of the Series 8, and the Apple Watch Series 9 gives you a new "finewoven" fabric bands instead. Those come with a magnetic buckle, similar to the Modern Buckle strap, and there are also new Hermes and Nike straps that are all about recycling. Of course, these new bands are backwards compatible with previous Apple Watch models.

Apple says that the new FineWoven band that replaces the leather straps is a "luxurious and durable microtwill made of 68 percent post-consumer recycled content that has significantly lower carbon emissions compared to leather." FineWoven feels like suede, claims Apple, and comes with the Magnetic Link and Modern Buckle bands. In our experience, the band is nice, but lacks the character and softness of leather, and we would not describe it as "luxurious". It's a fine strap, just not too impressive and probably not worth the high price tag. Luckily, if you want a leather strap, there is a huge variety of options from other brands.

Performance & Features

In the last three generations of Apple Watches - the Series 6, Series 7 and Series 8 - Apple used different chip names (S6, S7 and S8 respectively), but all of those chips were based on the same design with a dual-core CPU with the T8301 identifier and were largely based on the Apple A13 Bionic chip design. The only performance improvement claim from Apple came way back with Series 6 and S6 chip, which the company said launched apps 20 percent faster.

The Apple Watch Series 9 debuts a new S9 chip, based on the A15 Bionic. This new piece of silicon delivers big gains in speed and also efficiency, which would result in apps launching faster and longer battery life too. 

Apple Watch Series 9 now comes with upgraded quad-core Neural Engine that can process machine learning tasks up to twice as fast, when compared with Apple Watch Series 8. The very same new S9 chip also powers the Apple Watch Ultra Gen 2.

While it exists in the accessibility options of the Series 8 watches, the S9 chip allows the Double Tap function to take a whole new universe of tasks. Pinching your fingers together now triggers "the primary button in an app so it can be used to stop a timer, play and pause music, or snooze an alarm."

You can also take or end calls with the Double Tap option, or snap a picture using the Camera Remote function of the Apple Watch 9. One can open Smart Stack from the watch face with it, and go through the widgets with another finger pinch. Take that, Apple Watch 8!

Thanks to the S9 chipset, Siri requests can now be processed on the watch itself for a way faster and more accurate responses. The new quad-core Neural Engine now makes dictation with up to 25% better accuracy than the Apple Watch Series 8.

Since on-device processing is siloed, this makes Siri more secure, so you can use it to pull Health app data, or ask it personal fitness questions like how many hours of sleep did they get or their blood sugar status. Siri can now be tasked with remembering a health log like medication times and quantities, too!

Battery and Charging

Same battery sizes, but '18-hour battery life'

The Series 9 has the same battery sizes as its predecessor, meaning the following Apple Watch Series 9/Series 8 battery sizes:

And despite that new chip, battery life is the same, rated at 18 hours by Apple itself.

In simpler terms, you do have to charge your watch every night, or if you want to track your sleep, you could use it from one morning to the next one, and then give it a quick recharge, but you won't be able to go two days between charges.