Apple Watch Series 5 review: the best smartwatch with an always-on screen, a beautiful display, and new apps, but its battery life hasn't improved
There's basically no competition — The highest praise I can give the new Apple Watch Series 5 is simply this: it's an Apple Watch.
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple closed the biggest gap in its smartwatch line with Series 5. Last year's Series 4 review praised the screen, battery, and health tracking but flagged the missing always-on option and unreliable Siri — and the hands-on earlier this month already showed the new model looks like a dead ringer for Series 4, with the always-on display doing the heavy lifting.
So the pitch is refinement, not reinvention: the display now behaves like a real timepiece and there are new apps, but reviewers keep landing on the same caveat — battery life hasn't moved an inch.
First-order effects
- Buyers deciding between generations face a clean trade-off: Series 5's always-on screen versus Series 4's identical hardware at a presumably lower price once the refresh lands.
Second-order effects
- With 'basically no competition' in the category, rivals must match always-on displays without sacrificing their own battery claims, while Apple can iterate on minor updates because the installed base — estimated to have added 30M users in 2020 alone — upgrades on design polish rather than spec jumps.
Third-order effects
- The pattern holds across generations: the Series 7 review two years later still cites roughly one day of battery life, suggesting Apple has structurally accepted daily charging as the cost of a full-color always-on screen — and that yearly reviews will keep grading the watch on incremental features rather than endurance.
The trend: The smartwatch market has matured into a one-horse race where Apple ships annual refinements around a fixed one-day battery, and competitors chase parity on display rather than endurance.