This Year’s Biggest Apple Watch Upgrade May Be an ‘AI Doctor’
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Recent reports have suggested that the Apple Watch Series 11 will be light on hardware updates this year, but it may have a lot more to offer under the hood if the next phase of Apple’s artificial intelligence ambitions works out.
We’ve heard the song and dance of major changes to the aesthetics of Apple’s wearable more than once; first, the Apple Watch Series 7 was supposed to get a big redesign that failed to materialize (and was likely never in the cards to begin with), and then it was the so-called “Apple Watch X” that was supposed to include some significant changes to mark the tenth anniversary of the Apple Watch.
Unlike the Series 7, where Apple dashed everyone’s hopes at the last minute, most reliable sources reversed course by the summer. Despite scheduling its fall event ten years to the day of the original Apple Watch announcement, what we ended up with was a design that was merely refined — thinner and lighter than ever with an even larger screen — but by no means revolutionary.
Apple doesn’t change the design of the Apple Watch that often — the Series 4, Series 7, and now Series 10 were the watershed moments in the lineup — so it’s a safe bet that this year’s Series 11 will look the same. That means the only real hardware differences will be on the inside.
The Apple Watch Series 11 will almost certainly get a new S11 chip, although it remains to be seen whether that will be a significant upgrade from the S10, which is itself just a repackaged version of the S9. Apple tends to reuse the same core silicon in two to three generations of Apple Watch; the S4/S5 and the S6/S7/S8 were both effectively the same chips.
The other thing we’re unlikely to see in this year’s Apple Watch is new health sensors. Blood pressure tracking has been on the horizon for a while, but it seems that Apple is still struggling to perfect it. At this point, it’s probably too late for it to be included in the Series 11. Meanwhile, blood glucose monitoring is still years away.
Fortunately, there’s much more to the Apple Watch than just the hardware. Rumors have been circulating for a few months that Apple is planning to create an AI-driven health monitoring service, and the Apple Watch is expected to be at the center of that.
Apple’s ‘AI Doctor’
Over the weekend, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who has provided insight into Apple’s health ambitions in this area before, shared that Apple is “preparing its biggest health care push to date with a revamped app and AI doctor service.”
Against that backdrop, Apple’s health team is working on something that could have a quicker payoff — and help the company finally deliver on Cook’s vision. The initiative is called Project Mulberry, and it involves a completely revamped Health app plus a health coach. The service would be powered by a new AI agent that would replicate — at least to some extent — a real doctor.
Mark Gurman
The initiative has been in the works for a few years; we shared a report from Gurman in 2023 when it was code-named “Quartz” and was expected to become a dedicated app and the culmination of a long-rumored “Health+” service. However, Gurman says it’s “taken many twists and turns” since then, one of which is becoming more of an artificial intelligence project.
The initial vision for Project Quartz was to provide a more basic coaching service that would encourage a healthy lifestyle by helping folks improve exercise, diet, and sleep habits. It’s unclear how much analysis would be involved, but it was expected to be fairly rudimentary. It doesn’t take a lot of intelligence to analyze basic physiological metrics like heart rate and sleep cycles and suggest that you need more cardio or an earlier bedtime.
However, the new version, dubbed “Project Mulberry,” aims to go much deeper. “The service would be powered by a new AI agent that would replicate — at least to some extent — a real doctor,” Gurman says.
The service is also expected to follow the idea of Apple’s Fitness+ by offering a human element. Apple’s in-house doctors are training the AI agent, but it’s also looking to bring in outside medical professionals with expertise in key areas to record videos that would help explain concepts and how to make lifestyle improvements. Categories covered would include sleep, nutrition, physical therapy, mental health, and cardiology.
Gurman reports that Apple is already opening a new facility in California where physicians can shoot their video content. It’s also looking for a “major doctor personality” to host the new service.
In addition to providing more insight into all the metrics that the Apple Watch already collects, such as heart rate, blood oxygen levels, respiratory rate, sleep tracking, and exercise, Apple is expected to delve much deeper into food tracking. That’s an area the company has previously shied away from. The Health app provides a place to enter this data, but Apple leaves it up to third-party apps to handle all this.
While there was a rumor in 2021 that camera-based food tracking could appear in iOS 15, that never happened. Visual Look Up improved in iOS 17 to include food recognition, but so far, that’s only to help find related recipes. Analyzing nutrients from a photo is far more complicated, and Gurman hasn’t said anything about that coming in Project Mulberry — although it’s undoubtedly part of Apple’s longer-term ambitions.
Instead, Gurman says that Apple will leverage the cameras on its devices, such as your iPhone, to analyze workout techniques. This could help with physiotherapy recommendations and tie into Apple Fitness+ to propose tailored workout regimens.
This project is apparently “almost the entire focus” of Apple’s health group right now. Gurman says it’s the priority of Dr. Sumbul Desai, the company’s VP of health, but it’s also being championed by Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer, who has been at the helm of many of the company’s Apple Watch announcements and health initiatives over the years.
As for when it’s coming? Don’t expect it to be ready for this fall, but it should hopefully arrive sometime in the iOS 19 and watchOS 12 lifecycle. Right now, Gurman suggests that’s iOS 19.4 and watchOS 12.4, which will launch around this time next year. However, if everything is on track, there’s a good chance we’ll see it announced at Apple’s fall event.
[The information provided in this article has NOT been confirmed by Apple and may be speculation. Provided details may not be factual. Take all rumors, tech or otherwise, with a grain of salt.]
