The Apple Watch has been the undisputed heavyweight of the smartwatch world for a decade, but Apple appears to be quietly reconsidering what the whole thing should even look like. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the company is going back to the drawing board with some genuinely radical ideas on the table.
The trigger is competition. A new breed of screenless, wear-and-forget fitness trackers — the Oura Ring chief among them — has proven that plenty of people want passive health monitoring without a glowing rectangle strapped to their wrist. That’s a market Apple currently doesn’t play in, and it seems keen to fix that.
Among the concepts reportedly being explored:
- Round screens — a departure from the squarish display that has defined every Apple Watch since 2015. Gurman notes, however, that a circular Apple Watch has been investigated before and is unlikely to actually ship.
- Screenless fitness accessories — devices that ditch the display entirely, leaning on sensors and companion apps rather than an on-wrist interface.
- New shapes and sizes — a broader rethink of the form factor rather than the usual incremental case-size tweaks.
It’s worth being clear-eyed about where this sits. None of this is a product. There’s no model name, no price, no spec sheet and no launch window, because these are pre-development concepts rather than anything approaching a shipping device. Apple hasn’t committed to a direction, and Gurman suggests anything genuinely new is still years out.
Still, the fact that Apple is entertaining ideas this far outside its comfort zone is telling. The Apple Watch has iterated conservatively — bigger screens, brighter panels, more health sensors — while its silhouette stayed put. The rise of the smart ring category has clearly rattled the cage, hinting that the assumptions baked into the original Watch may not hold for the next decade.
A round display would be the most visible shake-up, aligning Apple with the many Android-side smartwatches that have long favored circular faces. But the more interesting bet may be the screenless route. If Apple is serious about competing with the Oura Ring, it would mean accepting that not every wearable needs to be a tiny iPhone on your arm — a philosophical shift for a company that has always sold the display as the star.
For now, this is a look inside Apple’s kitchen rather than a menu. But it suggests the Apple Watch as we know it isn’t sacred, and that the next big redesign could be less about a faster chip and more about rethinking the concept from the ground up.
