 The Apple Watch Series 4 was the most impressive thing that Apple announced last week. I've been reviewing it since then, and I gotta tell ya, it lives up to the hype. Now we should start with the hardware, because more than on any other part of this watch, the hardware is where they really knocked it out of the park. For the very first time since basically the original Apple Watch, the hardware here has been fully redesigned. There's new sizes, new screens, new speakers, and of course there's new stuff inside it. But it still looks like an Apple Watch, so let's really get into it. So with the Series 4, there's two new sizes. There's 40 millimeter and 44 millimeter. This is the 44 millimeter. Now before this, I was using the 42 millimeter size, the bigger size on the Series 3, and it's only subtly bigger than it was before, but it's also subtly thinner, and to me the trade-off is totally worth it. You're really not gonna notice that difference all that much, and I think that also is gonna apply to people who prefer the smaller watch. Before we get too deep into this, we really should talk pricing, because these watches, they're really not that cheap. The least expensive model is the 40 millimeter with GPS plus Wi-Fi, and that's 399, but there's a whole bunch of add-ons you can do, so let me just take a look here. It's 30 bucks more for the larger size. If you wanna get LTE, that's usually about 100 bucks more, plus the 10 bucks a month or so your carrier's gonna charge you. If you wanna get one of the steel models, that's somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 bucks more. You also could add Apple Care on top of that. You could easily spend six, 700 bucks on one of these things without even noticing it, and don't even get me started on the Hermes model. series 4 looks basically the same as before. It's got the same lozenge shape and the same two-button layout, but Apple's really careful with the curves on these larger size, so that it's still compatible with existing watch bands. Even third-party watch bands still look fine on these watches. Where things start to look different is when the screen turns on, because the screens on these watches are just incredibly good. They're 30% bigger than the old models, and they go closer to the edge of the watch, and they make the screens on the older generations of the Apple Watch look really tiny and cramped. The corners of the screen are rounded, so it just feels more natural to the watch. It's still OLED, so the blacks are still true black, and these screens are just big, and they're beautiful, and I love them. But moving on, there are some other changes to the hardware you should know about. So the back is now ceramic instead of metal, and that's to allow wireless signals to pass through the ceramic, giving it better reception. They've moved the microphone over here in between the two buttons, and that makes it better for calls. But the thing that actually makes it better for calls is the louder speaker on this side. It's seriously, like, super-duper loud. On the inside, there is a faster processor, of course. There's Bluetooth 5.0 on the W3 wireless chip, and there's a new set of more accurate sensors, which is gonna become important later. There's also this haptic feedback when you turn the digital crown, which I thought would be gimmicky, but I actually really like it. The other thing that they've done, if you get the LTE model, is there's no longer a big, dumb red dot on the digital crown. It's just a nice, little, subtle red ring now, so good job. As for battery life, well, it's stupendous. I used this thing all weekend without charging it, and that included walking around for a couple of hours using maps, making a couple calls on LTE, and also doing some workout stuff, which is not me, but I did it, for science. And I didn't have to charge this thing until the end of the day on Sunday. Apple says that it gets about 18 hours of battery life, or you can do about six hours of outdoor workout time, and you know what, they totally hit that number. In fact, the battery life is so good that I wish Apple gave me an option to have the screen just be always on all the time so you don't have to twist your wrist to see the time, but you can't do that. You still gotta twist your wrist to see the time. It's fine. So the newest version of WatchOS is WatchOS 5, and honestly, it's kind of a grab bag of new features. There's support for podcasts and streaming Apple music, and new fitness and health options, and walkie-talkie mode, and heck, you can open links in iMessage to web pages, and they get displayed automatically in readability mode. I don't know, hooray for the web. I love reading the web on my watch. Now, you might remember that last year's Apple Watch had some launch issues with LTE, but Apple fixed those up pretty quickly, and this year, I haven't had any major problems with LTE. In fact, when people have called me and I've used the watch to take the call, they didn't believe I wasn't talking to them on the phone, and the speaker on this thing is so loud, you don't have to hold it up to your ear to hear people. You can just kind of hold your wrist naturally and actually have a conversation. It's really impressive, but it still does take the watch a minute or two to get connected on LTE, which can be a little bit frustrating because you don't know if it's gonna work or not, and that's most clear and most obvious with Siri. Siri is still Siri. One new neat feature is you can just raise your wrist and start talking and Siri will respond, but I don't know, a lot of the time, instead of Siri becoming available, it just says, hang on, dot, dot, dot, and I'll tap you when I'm ready, dot, dot, dot, and you just never really trust Siri to work the first time that you use it. Now, there's also some software features that are exclusive to the Series 4, and that includes new watch faces, the electrocardiogram feature, and fall detection. The new watch faces are designed to show just how big these new Apple Watch screens are, and some of them are beautiful. I especially love the water watch face, which has an animated water and shows a clock hand. I think it's great, but the one that Apple is showing off is called Infograph, and it's designed to show off how many complications they can fit on a single screen. I'm okay with a ton of complications, but the colors here are just, they're all over the place. This one's orange and this one's yellow, and this one goes from green to yellow. I know some people are gonna like it, but I super don't. Oh, and Apple still isn't allowing third-party watch faces, which is kind of a bummer. I'd really like to get an information-dense watch screen like this without so many just colors everywhere. So the walkie-talkie feature on the Apple Watch is pretty cool. To use it, both you and your friend have to agree to be friends, and you both have to be available, and the reason that exists is the first time you talk to somebody on the walkie-talkie mode, your voice just calls out from their watch. So to do it, you hit the complication or open up the app, you tap on the name of the person you wanna talk to, and then there's just a big yellow talk button, and you just hold your finger down on it and you talk. So you could say, hey Dan, how's it going? I'm calling you on walkie-talkie, obviously. So that's nice, but the first time you do it, there's this message that says connecting to Dan, because what walkie-talkie mode actually is is a FaceTime call that's just interrupted by you tapping the push to talk button. So Dan just replied, hey, I'm doing really good, we're just demoing this on video for you, we'll probably do this a couple of times. Yeah, it works really well, except that this is pretty great, but you have to use your other hand to tap the thing, you can't push a button, and it's also like, if you've got one of your hands full, you basically can't use this thing, right? That's the other problem with it. Yeah, that's probably one of my biggest frustrations. I can't even hold a coffee cup and do this at the same time. I have a trick, hang on. The trick, if you've got a coffee in your hand, is a new thing that I'm calling nose calling, where the thing is, Dan, you can use your nose, it totally works. Well, I guess the good thing about using my nose for this is my other hand is free to pop baseball. The health and fitness side of watchOS 5 is in a lot of ways a lot more interesting, because Apple is separating out the ideas that are in the watch, and they're trying to figure out what's going on and separating out the ideas of fitness and health. On the fitness side, the new features are, you can do these workout competitions with your friends over the course of a week, and it will also do automatic workout detection in case you forget to open up the little app and hit start or end workout. On the health side of the equation, it's doing a bunch of interesting stuff. It can now detect low heart rates, for example, and later this year, it's gonna be able to detect irregular heart rates, too. It can also do fall detection, which is a really interesting feature, and I think it's really gonna benefit a lot of people. It can automatically detect with these new sensors whether or not you've had a hard fall, and if it thinks you've fallen and hurt yourself, it will offer to call emergency services, and if you don't respond within, I don't know, a minute or something, it will just go ahead and call those services and also text your emergency contact to let them know that something might be wrong. I have been trying to manually trigger the fall detection by hurling myself onto the bed or the couch, and it hasn't worked yet. I don't know, maybe the watch can tell that I'm acting. I do think it's a great feature, I just can't tell you whether or not it super works. The headline-grabbing feature of the Series 4 is the new electrocardiogram feature, so it's got sensors on the bottom, also on the digital crown. You hold it down, it takes a reading, and then you can send a PDF to your doctor. Unfortunately, they haven't turned that on yet, so I can't test it and tell you if it works or not. When Apple introduced the very first Apple Watch, it was kind of a mess. It was trying to do way too much, and both the software and the hardware just couldn't live up to what they're trying to do with it. And on top of that, Apple really didn't know what the watch's purpose was, but since then, they've really figured it out, and this year, they focused on making everything better. It has a better screen, it has better speed, it has better fitness features, and most of all, it has better health features. Now, there are still some things I'd like to see improved. I wish there were more watch face options, and Series still kind of unreliable, and you know, these things are still pretty expensive, especially given how quickly Apple's iterating them. It makes deciding whether or not to upgrade a really hard call. But if you have an older Apple Watch, I think you're gonna be blown away by this year's updates. Heck, it makes me feel bad that I bought the Series 3 last year, because this one is so much better. Bottom line, if you've been waiting to buy or upgrade an Apple Watch, now's a really good time to get one. Peter. What? I mean, there are a lot of complications when it comes to buying an Apple Watch, and people are watching to see what we think of it. Oh my God, Peter. Look, this is kind of expensive, and people just need to know that time is money. I'm kidding, you are. Okay.