If you planned to purchase Apple Watch Series 9, today seems like a good time to dive. The smartwatch is currently on sale for $299 at multiple retailers, including Amazon, Best buy, Target and Walmart. It’s not the lowest price we’ve seen — several colors briefly fell to $269 earlier this month, for example — but steeper discounts are generally uncommon. This deal takes about $30 off the regular watch street price on Amazon and is $100 less than buying directly from Apple. At the time of writing, the offer applies to the 41mm non-cell version of the watch in Midnight, Red, Silver or Starlight. Fits models with S/M or M/L size rubber sports band or nylon sports band.
Photo by Cherlynn Low / Engadget
This is one of the lowest prices we’ve seen for Apple’s latest wearable.
We gave the Apple Watch Series 9 a score of 92 in our review last September, and it’s currently the top pick in our guide to the best smartwatches. It’s fast, waterproof, and can still handle many tasks that would normally require an iPhone, from checking iMessages to calling Siri to using Apple Pay. Most of the basic health and fitness tracking features are still here, as well as safety-related tools like fall detection and an emergency SOS feature. Compared to the cheaper Apple Watch SE, it has a slightly larger display that can remain always on, making it less cumbersome to check the time at a glance.
New to this model is the convenient Double Tap feature, which allows you to respond to notifications without having to physically touch the device, and the ability to perform many Siri requests on the device without having to always be online. It also has twice the internal memory (64GB) of the Series 8, and the peak display brightness (2000 nits) is twice as high.
However, the usual caveats for any Apple Watch still apply. The whole thing will only work with the iPhone. The battery will last most of a typical day, but not much more. There are better sleep tracking options out there. Due to an ongoing patent dispute, Apple also had to disable the watch blood oxygen monitoring feature. Overall, there’s not a huge need to switch if you own an Apple Watch today and are still happy with it. But if you’re looking to upgrade today, it should be good value.
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