Apple Watch Ultra 3 Launching Later This Year With Two Key Upgrades

Wednesday July 2, 2025 1:13 pm PDT by Joe Rossignol

The long wait for an Apple Watch Ultra 3 appears to be nearly over, and it is rumored to feature both satellite connectivity and 5G support.

Apple Watch Ultra's existing Night Mode

In his latest Power On newsletter, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said that the Apple Watch Ultra 3 is on track to launch this year with "significant" new features, including satellite connectivity, which would let you send text messages when Wi-Fi and cellular coverage is unavailable. This feature will work without an iPhone, he said.

Gurman also expects the Apple Watch Ultra 3 to support a special version of 5G for smartwatches. The existing Ultra models support LTE.

Last year, the Apple Watch Ultra 2 received a black titanium case option, but otherwise the Ultra model has not received any hardware upgrades since 2023.

Other likely upgrades for the Apple Watch Ultra 3 include an S10 chip or newer, faster charging, and a wide-angle OLED display that is brighter when viewed from an angle and offers a higher refresh rate for the always-on display mode. All of these improvements were already introduced on the Apple Watch Series 10 last year.

In March, Gurman said Apple was still experiencing issues with a planned blood pressure monitoring feature for the Apple Watch, so it is unclear if that will be ready in time for the Ultra 3, which should launch in a little over two months from now.

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Top Rated Comments

jz0309

18 months ago

well, if those 2 are the main upgrades - I certainly will NOT upgrade my Ultra 2.
For me, they fall in the "nice to have" category.
And the other features mentioned? meh, I'll take 'em ...

IF Apple does not come out with a new health sensor - AW will go thru a dire year ...

Score: 31 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Think|Different

18 months ago

Sooooo, much ado about nothing? Sad, my 1st gen’s battery is on its last legs.

Score: 19 Votes (Like | Disagree)

BarrettF77

18 months ago

They still haven't brought back the 02 sensing in the USA. Not buying some gimped version of a watch from Apple again. And a "special version" of 5G. Just another excuse for the carries to justify some silly price hike on what limited functionality we use a watch for anyways. $10 per month was respectable. $15 a month for LTE is just dumb.

Apple has really just sunk in our opinion and not what we wanted from them at this point. The new Samsung watches will be great to try out this year as well as the new Fold 7 since Apple is stuck in 2018 for the time being.

Score: 18 Votes (Like | Disagree)

GrassShark

18 months ago

The only real improvements I want to see are a meaningful bump in battery life across the range and then some improvement in sustaining battery health over time. I’m sure it’s got to do with charging speed but it feels like modern Apple batteries just fail faster than they used to.

Score: 16 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Sergio The One

18 months ago

I got an Apple Watch recently and before buying it I asked some athlete friends of mine & watched a ton of videos and reviews, and what most people have been missing from the AW that keeps them using a competitor is

1. battery life
2. Less reliance on the touch screen while in a workout
2. A better Health app with actual insights into your data, like Whoop does (which is a terrible product btw but the app is more useful).
3. Better support for offline maps and routes.

So mostly software stuff really. If Apple can overcome those things, I know a lot of people would switch from Garmin and others.

Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)