Apple Smartwatch | Apple smart watch
The Apple smartwatch market has remained stable and uneventful for almost a decade, with Apple in the lead and Samsung close behind as the only two companies that command any real relevancy at all. Then, in 2025, the Apple smartwatch market was forever altered with the arrival of the nearly perfect Google Pixel Watch.
The Google Pixel Watch 4 is the first watching to challenge Apple truly since the original Apple Watch was released.
How is Google pulling this off, though?
They are not trying to beat Apple at its own game… Google is just getting better at what they are already good at.
Essential Meaning Locked In:
- The Pixel Watch 4 represents Apple’s first real competitor.
- Google is pulling it off nicely.
- The strategy is to avoid competing with Apple.
- The company is trying to build on its own unique strengths.
- In wearables, artificial intelligence is the new frontier, and Google has the first mover advantage.
The main distinction between the Apple Watch Series 11 and Google Pixel Watch 4 is not around hardware, such as sensors and displays, but related to the different purpose within the lives of the person/companies that produce them.
Google Assistant
Apple is still very much in the camp of thinking of smart watches as health devices, while Google has transitioned to thinking of it as an “actually smart piece of technology.” This is abundantly clear in the Pixel Watch 4, which (aside from the hardware) features a refreshed Apple Smartwatch Google Assistant branded as “Gemini,” which feels like a leap forward in wearables.
Gemini is fast, contextually aware, and runs on-device for privacy and speed while being capable of summarizing your day, choreographing workouts, or help prep your dinner.
iPhone
In comparison, Siri seems to be falling behind, especially on the Apple Watch. Siri’s features are mainly limited to the simplest functions such as setting timers and responding to messages, and is solely reliant on being paired with an Apple Smartwatch iPhone or having Wi-Fi connection.
Apple Intelligence also has not yet launched in a meaningful way on Apple Watches, but will have limited functionality whenever it does.
And unlike Google’s Gemini on the Pixel Watch 4, which is open-ended and context-aware, Apple will likely limit Siri to operating within a set of approved applications, as this is historically Apple’s way of asking their users to interact with their applications.
Google’s AI Health Coach
Apple Smartwatch Conversely, the Google AI Health Coach is situated in a more proactive space, showing users how to take action on that data in advance to prevent issues, recommending workouts, and suggesting recovery and dynamically adjusting daily activity goals.
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This technology is admittedly nascent and limited, but it’s clear that Google is already in the lead.
Establishing a lead in wearable AI is vitally important because this is the area that will define the next competitive battleground in the industry. In the future, the most important differentiator will no longer be ‘many’ sports modes or durability of the device; the most important differentiator will be the ability of a device to intelligently integrate with the user and their physiological response.
The Pixel Watch 4 conveys a more Apple experience than Samsung has ever offered.
For years, Samsung pursued a path to defeat Apple by adding features: extra health sensors, new gesture controls, and its own Galaxy AI. Its result, the Galaxy Watch was a powerful experience but often felt disjointed. Now, with Wear OS 6, Google has the same cohesive and polished user experience Apple had in the beginning.
The Pixel Watch 4, feels like the polished software of an iPhone, just set in Google’s vernacular. It is playful, expressive, and curiosity and interaction are invited.
Apple Smartwatch Material 3 Expressive
From the moment you turn the rotating crown and see the new Actua 360 face light up, you know you are dealing with a Apple smartwatch from a company that understands its own ecosystem very well.
The new Material 3 Expressive interface is bright, lively, engaging, and dynamic. Notifications are surprising, animations glide, and overall interactions with core apps have an effortless character to them, especially with integrated apps like Google Wallet, Maps, and taking a picture with the camera shutter.
Hardware is still important, but usability is even more important.
With regard to quality of build in the U.S. market, Apple still leads the way. The Series 11 offer titanium and sapphire glass options that Google just can’t match, and the thinner, lighter build means it’s more comfortable to wear for long days or even overnight.
The Pixel Watch 4, though, is thicker and feels more delicate even though it is more repairable now. It is still a gorgeous watch with a minimalist pebble shape, and a curved glass face, and it’s the model that I prefer over the Apple Watch purely for aesthetics. But it wasn’t made to take a beating, and I tend to scratch all my watches, therefore I personally prefer something that is durable.
Apple Pixel Watch 4
The Pixel Watch 4 wins swiftly thanks to its display and battery life. The Display is a 3,000-nit Actua 360 AMOLED, giving it a brighter bolder image than the Series 11 with its 2,000-nit screen. Thanks to the way the display melts into the domed glass, it instantly makes Apple’s flat panel look dated.
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The Series 11 also finally broke its previous limit of 18 hours of battery life to a full 24, but again, the Pixel Watch 4 laps it with up to 40 hours of battery life, which is a solid two days of use for most people.
Google also wins on connectivity. The Pixel Watch 4 has Emergency SOS via satellite on the watch itself, while Apple reserves that feature for its Ultra 3 watch, which is far more expensive.
Privacy: The one privilege Apple is still king
Even so, the balance of benefits does not tip entirely in Google’s favor. Users who care about privacy around health data are still better off with Apple. A report by VPN Mentor states that Apple shares data in “excellent” ways compared to Google’s data sharing that is rated, “good.”
Apple doesn’t sell or share your health data and requires the user’s permission to access every data point.
Google, despite being better than its competitors (such as Samsung or Meta), and better than most “free products,” still pulls data inside its other “free” services, Google provides limited data sharing with third parties.
This may be acceptable to many users, but for a viewpoint of someone that needs complete privacy for personal health decisions, Apple Smartwatch will be the clearly safer option.
Apple’s reign is not over, but their reign over monopolistic reign of the market hated with the waning of their reign.
Apple remains the leading Apple smartwatch maker for iPhone users, offering solid engineering, a host of health features, and near-perfect execution. However, for the first time, it seems the company’s grip on the smartwatch market is tenuous.
The Pixel Watch 4 brings to the verge of Apple smartwatch the fun factor the Apple Watch lost several years ago.
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It doesn’t want to be your doctor, it wants to be your friend— like a digital pet that helps you.
If Apple wants to remain the leader in the Apple smartwatch space, it needs to breathe some energy and vitality into the Apple Smartwatch, and has to do what Google has accomplished with the Pixel Watch 4. The only problem is, Google has a significant head start, making that hard to do.
Samsung could also launch yet another Galaxy Watch that challenges both Apple and Google. Regardless of where the future takes us, it seems the Apple smartwatch market is about to get a lot more interesting.
