Apple Watch Series 4 review: beautiful screen, great battery life, and health-tracking features, but Siri is unreliable, and there is no always-on screen option
The screen steals the show — The greatest Apple product comeback story of the past few years has, without a doubt, been the Apple Watch.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Series 4 is the payoff to a long arc: the original 2015 Apple Watch was praised as the nicest smartwatch but dinged for slow apps and location services, and three years of iteration have turned it into what The Verge now calls the platform's comeback story. This review lands on the strengths — display, battery life, health tracking — while flagging two gaps: Siri that doesn't reliably work, and no always-on screen.
Both gaps are exactly where the line goes next. A year later Apple ships the always-on display in the Series 5 without improving battery life, and the budget Apple Watch SE later re-creates this review's trade-off deliberately by stripping the always-on display and ECG to hit its price.
First-order effects
- Buyers get the strongest Watch hardware yet — better screen, battery, and health features than any prior model — but anyone whose workflow depends on voice control inherits Siri's unreliability, and everyone still has to raise a wrist to check the time.
Second-order effects
- Apple's own roadmap absorbs the criticism within a year: the Series 5 adds the always-on screen this review calls out, confirming the omission was generational timing rather than a technical dead end.
- The SE turns this review's feature list into a pricing lever — same performance as the Series 4 minus the always-on display and ECG — letting Apple segment the lineup along exactly the axes reviewers scored.
Third-order effects
- Battery becomes the fixed constraint of the product line: once the always-on display arrives, the Series 5 gains it without battery improvement, and the Series 7 still ships with roughly one day of battery — display and health features advance while runtime plateaus.
- Review-cycle iteration hardens into Apple's cadence: each generation's headline complaint becomes the next generation's marquee feature, making annual reviews a de facto specification process for the wearable category.
The trend: Smartwatch competition is shifting from raw performance to displays and health sensing, with battery life frozen near a single day as each new capability consumes the efficiency gains.