Apple Watch SE 3 review: Brilliance on a budget

Best Prices Today: Apple Watch SE 3 (40mm)

Apple makes the best smartwatches on the market, but what if your budget doesn’t stretch to the $399 Series 11? (Let alone the $799 Ultra 3.) You consider the Apple Watch SE, which starts at just $249. Particularly now that Apple has launched the substantially upgraded 3rd-gen model.

In our in-depth Apple Watch SE 3 review, we put the device through a battery of tests and help you decide if this is the best Apple Watch for you.

Apple Watch SE 3 design: Reassuringly familiar

Historically, the Apple Watch SE tends to trail a few years behind the main line when it comes to design, and that remains the case here: in terms of chassis and screen size, for example, the SE 3 has more in common with the Series 6 from 2020 than the Series 11 released last month. But that’s less of an issue in this market than for smartphones, for example, because smartwatch design evolves extremely slowly, and the aesthetic changes between the Series 6 and now have been relatively minor tweaks to the formula rather than radical revamps.

So we’re still looking at a squarish rectangular chassis with rounded-off corners. The edges are still smart brushed metal, and this still contrasts attractively with the glossy screen on the front and the smooth matte surface of the underside. And the Action button remains an Ultra exclusive, so we get the same two controls as before, both on the right-hand edge: the Digital Crown dial and the discreet side button below it.

There’s nothing surprising about any of this, but it looks good and is intuitive to use. The SE 3 feels comfortable and unobtrusive on the wrist (which is particularly important for sleep tracking) while the controls fall naturally under your fingers without having to look. Perhaps we’ll get an Apple Watch Air next year, and perhaps the SE will inherit that design a few years after that. But for now this will do just fine.

Apple Watch SE 3 display: Always on, at last

So the physical design of the SE 3 remains largely the same as its immediate predecessor, and this includes the screen. It’s the same size as on the SE 2 (either 1.57 inches or 1.78 inches measured diagonally, depending on whether you go for the 40mm or 44mm model) and a little smaller than the screen you get on recent Series watches (1.77 or 1.96 inches). That extra fifth of an inch does make a difference, and it’s a little easier to see what you’re doing and accurately tap onscreen buttons on the bigger models.

There is one important screen change from the SE 2, but you won’t notice it until the watch goes to sleep. This year, the SE, for the first time, gets an always-on display. That doesn’t mean it remains lit up in exactly the same way all the time, but rather that, even when it’s inactive, it displays something. Each watch face has a sleep version, which is dimmer and less colorful and features fewer animated elements, and this means you get the essential information without draining the battery too much. You can then wake the watch up as normal (by rotating your wrist or tapping the screen) and you’ll promptly see the usual face again.

I use the California analog face, for example, and when the watch goes to sleep, I lose the red circle in the middle, the second hand, and a lot of the brightness. But I can still read the time, date, and local temperature, and see the progress of my fitness rings. It’s an excellent compromise. Just bear in mind that California happens to be one of the best faces for always-on functionality; some faces that rely on cool animations suffer a lot more when dimmed.

Having an always-on screen is a big upgrade for the Apple Watch SE. It’s in the nature of the device, as a fitness wearable, that it often gets used in odd or awkward positions where you can’t easily rotate a wrist or spare a hand to touch the screen, and being able to check key data regardless of this is helpful to a degree you probably won’t appreciate until you try it. The only possible downside is its impact on battery life, but, as we’ll see later, that isn’t a concern here.

The screen has also been upgraded to feature tougher Ion-X glass, which Apple claims is 4x more crack-resistant than the previous generation. That’s reassuring to hear, but difficult to test scientifically. I can certainly confirm that my SE 3 picked up precisely zero scratches in two weeks of constant and not especially careful use, but that doesn’t mean yours will be immune to harm.

Apple Watch SE 3 features: New possibilities

In theory, the Apple Watch has the potential, barring photography, to be almost as versatile as an iPhone or iPad, thanks to the huge range of third-party apps it can install and run. In practice, it’s more limited. Games, with a few honorable exceptions such as Lifeline, which come up with inventive ways around the small-screen problem, are something of a non-starter, and most of the watch’s useful functions revolve around either notifications (where being on your wrist at all times is a great convenience) or health and fitness.

On the latter front, the SE range gains some new medical features with this update. The SE 3 offers nightly wrist temperature tracking, retrospective ovulation estimates, and sleep apnea notifications, all new additions to the SE line. Wrist temperature can be used to feed into broader health insights, and is intended to monitor averages over the long term; it takes some menu diving even to see the previous night’s absolute temperatures rather than variance from the baseline, and absolutely don’t expect to use this as a spot-check thermometer. Sleep apnea notifications tell you, as the name suggests, if you’re exhibiting signs of that condition. And I wasn’t in a position to test the ovulation feature.

These are nice options to have in your health-monitoring toolbox, but all three have been available on the Series line since 2023 (and in some cases further back than that) and I suspect that for most users they will make only a small difference to the overall experience. You will get far more out of the stalwart health and fitness features that have been available for a decade: workouts, calorie tracking, step counting. At this stage in the Apple Watch’s evolution, it’s perhaps inevitable that the most useful health features have already been added: a heart sensor right from the start (and then improved in 2018), sleep tracking in 2017, a mindfulness app in 2020. Anything added to a product 10 years after it first launched is likely to be a nice-to-have rather than a crucial upgrade.

Mind you, it must be said that there remain gaps in the SE’s health feature set. It still doesn’t offer an ECG sensor, even though the Series 4 got that in 2018. Similarly, it can’t measure blood oxygen, which the Series 6 could manage in 2020. Most users would regard these as bigger priorities than the upgrades given to the SE this year… and clearly a deliberate decision by Apple.

Outside of the realm of health and fitness, there are new software-based controls. The new wrist-flick gesture added in watchOS 26, for example, is supported by the SE 3 (and no other SE model), as well as the older double-tap.

Wrist flick lets you dismiss notifications and return to your watch face using that gesture alone, which is handy when you don’t have a hand free to tap the screen. I’m still getting used to it, but I can already see it becoming a key part of how I interact with my Apple Watch. Double tap, on the other hand (or on the same hand, to be exact: it lets you tap a finger and thumb of your watch hand together twice to answer a call or reply to a message), has been available since I got a Series 9 more than two years ago, and I simply don’t use it, which says everything for its utility.

The SE 3, unlike its predecessors, offers on-device Siri, which should mean voice interactions (which no longer have to go via the companion iPhone) are smoother and faster. I’m used to the Series 9, which also has on-device Siri, so I won’t pretend to have noticed much of a difference, but I can confirm that Siri on the SE 3 is objectively fast and helpful. And this matters: being able to start a workout, set a timer, or get your current step count without having to interact with the Apple Watch’s small screen is a genuine time-saver, so any boost to this function is appreciated. And while we’re talking about audio, the SE 3 has the ability to play media via its tiny (and tinny) speaker, which struck me as somewhat pointless but is an option you may occasionally use.

On the connectivity side, the Apple Watch SE gains 5G support this year, and does so at exactly the same time as the Series and Ultra lines. In some ways, that’s less of a big deal than it was when the iPhone got 5G in 2020, because smartwatches don’t rely on cellular the way phones do; many customers won’t feel it’s worth the extra $50, and they may well be right. But 5G infrastructure, in the U.S., the U.K., and other parts of the world, is far more developed now than it was in 2020, so if you do pay for 5G you’ll get the benefit of faster cellular connections in more places. And this is another step towards the Apple Watch as a standalone device that can survive without its companion iPhone.

Apple Watch SE 3 battery life: Secretly superb

The big news this year was that, for the first time in history, Apple Watches were given longer battery estimates than their immediate predecessors. The standard model jumped from 18 hours on the Series 10 to 24 on the Series 11; the Ultra 2’s 36 hours was increased to 42 hours on the Ultra 3. All very exciting.

Officially, the SE 3 misses out on this festival of generosity, remaining stranded on 18 hours like both previous SE models. But something doesn’t quite add up. As my colleague Halyna Kubiv discovered, this year’s SE does have a higher-capacity battery, by a larger margin than either of its costlier siblings. The Ultra 3’s battery is 6 percent bigger, the Series 11’s is 10 to 11 percent bigger, while the SE 3 is top of the class with a 12 percent increase.

This is confusing. Given these numbers, why doesn’t the SE 3 get an increased runtime estimate too? Does Apple think new features (notably the always-on display) will increase power consumption so much that the extra battery capacity is cancelled out? Or is it simply trying, as it has done so often in the past, to make its cheaper products sound less appealing to customers?

My experience with the SE 3 points to the latter explanation, because battery life was excellent. It would generally make it to bedtime with 50-70 percent remaining, still be going strong at 30-50 percent the next morning (after a night of sleep tracking), then comfortably make it well into the afternoon of a second day. Several times it lasted until a second bedtime, and on one occasion it made it through two days and two nights and died early on the third day.

This is superb performance. It’s reminiscent of the glory days of the Series 2, which could last two and half days, but had the frankly unfair advantage of not offering either sleep tracking or an always-on display.

Now, it’s important to stress that Apple Watch battery performance is incredibly subjective. If you use the watch to track your sleep, it’ll use up significantly more power than if it’s sitting on the nightstand or tucked in a drawer; you’ll also see noticeable drops in battery levels whenever you do a workout. So, depending on whether you have an active day or not, you’re likely to see huge swings between maximum and minimum battery performance.

But this element of unpredictability makes it more important than ever for the SE 3 to have a good battery. It’s not enough to last for a day of “recommended” usage. It has to be able to deal with those outlier days when you get super-motivated and do three workouts. And luckily, the SE 3 is more than up to the task.

And when the battery is finally depleted, it’s a comfort to know that it can be topped up quickly thanks to new fast-charge features. Apple claims you can charge from zero to 80 percent in around 45 minutes (it took me a perfectly reasonable 48), and that a mere 15 minutes of charging will earn you 8 hours of runtime (which again seems about right based on my testing). In the past, charging speed felt irrelevant to the Apple Watch because this happened overnight, but the growing importance of sleep tracking means it’s far more likely to charge in a spare hour or two during the day, and these upgrades are good to have.

Apple Watch SE 3 price: Solid value

The Apple Watch SE 3 starts at $249/£219, which is the same price Apple charged for the SE 2 until this fall. (That device is no longer available direct from Apple, although you may find that other retailers still have stock remaining at a discounted price.) Bearing in mind the number of upgrades added for this generation, that price represents outstanding value for money.

• Apple Watch SE 3 (40mm, GPS): From $249/£219
• Apple Watch SE 3 (40mm, GPS + cellular): From $299/£289
• Apple Watch SE 3 (44mm, GPS): From $279/£249
• Apple Watch SE 3 (44mm, GPS + cellular): $329/£319

As well as chassis size and cellular connectivity, prices vary depending on the strap you choose.

Should you buy the Apple Watch SE 3?

This is a massive step forward for the Apple Watch SE. Just look at the list of upgrades: always-on display, bigger and better-performing battery, fast charging, improved scratch resistance, new (if relatively minor) health features, expanded gesture support, on-device Siri, and the option of 5G. All of this without increasing the price. The Apple Watch SE 3 is an enormously impressive upgrade on an already appealing product.

Sure, plumping for the Series 11 will get you a bigger and brighter screen, Precision Finding, and some more health features that are perhaps overdue for an appearance on the SE. But it costs $150 more, and it’s tough to argue that it’s worth the extra money. The SE 3 has everything you need from a smartwatch at an affordable price, and I don’t hesitate to recommend it.

Best Prices Today: Apple Watch SE 3 (40mm)