Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 went on sale September 18, 2026, starting at $399 and $799. We've spent the last few weeks covering the Pixel Watch 5 and Galaxy Watch 9, and this closes out the trilogy: all three major watch platforms refreshed within about a month of each other, and each one took a different approach to the same problem.
The headline for us: both new Apple Watches ship with 4GB of RAM, double the 2GB in Series 11 and the Ultra 2 and 3. That's a bigger jump than the Pixel Watch 5 made (2GB to 3GB) and it starts from a smaller base than the Galaxy Watch 9 did (which stayed flat at 2GB). Apple also gave both watches a new chip in the same generation, something neither Google nor Samsung fully did. Here's the breakdown.
Chip: S11, a 64-bit dual-core processor with a 4-core Neural Engine, on both Series 12 and Ultra 4. Apple calls it its most powerful wearable chip yet but hasn't published CPU or GPU performance percentages, or a GPU core count, the way Samsung did for the Galaxy Watch 9.
RAM: 4GB on both models, double the previous generation across the board.
Storage: 64GB on both models.
Display: Series 12 carries over its always-on wide-angle OLED at up to 2,000 nits from Series 11. Ultra 4 has a 1.9" display in the same 49mm case as Ultra 3.
Battery: Series 12 is rated up to 24 hours typical use, 38 hours in Low Power Mode, and up to 10 hours during an outdoor workout, 25% more than Series 11. Ultra 4 is rated up to 50 hours typical use, up from 42 on Ultra 3, and 84 hours in Low Power Mode. Charging is faster too: 15 minutes now gets you up to 12 hours of use, up from 8.
Software: watchOS 27, with Siri AI arriving in beta and a new Health Sensing System.
Why doubling RAM matters more here than it did for the other two
We said the Pixel Watch 5's RAM bump mattered because Wear OS games were hitting a memory ceiling. The same logic applies here, but the stakes are higher, because Apple Watch already has the deeper, more ambitious watch-native game catalog of the two ecosystems. We wrote about this back in July: roughly 95 of the top 100 watch games live on Apple Watch, not Wear OS. That is real, standalone watch games, not phone apps with a companion widget, which is the same bar we hold every game on this site to. Doubling to 4GB raises the ceiling for a catalog that was already pushing against it harder than anything on Wear OS.
Pairing that RAM increase with an actual new chip is the other half of the story. The Pixel Watch 5 got more memory but reused its GPU. The Galaxy Watch 9 got a genuinely new chip but no more memory. Apple did both in the same generation. Whatever the S11's GPU turns out to be capable of, it isn't being starved of memory the way a 2GB watch would starve it.
Games that will actually feel the difference
To be clear, we're only counting real watch-native games here, not phone games with a companion app on the watch. Apple Watch already has plenty of genuine standalone titles that make a RAM ceiling obvious when you hit it:
Lifeline: Beside You in Time by 3 Minute Games, Inc. is a full interactive story that runs entirely on the watch, tracking branching dialogue and story state for the whole session. At 4.9 stars it is one of the best-reviewed standalone games we track on either platform, and the kind of game that benefits directly from more headroom.
Rogue Watch by AlhoGames is a fantasy roguelike built natively for the watch. It's new and still building a rating history, but it is the clearest example of the genre Apple's extra memory is aimed at: real RPG mechanics, not a phone game ported down.
And ArcEmu by Raffaele D'Amato, the emulator we covered in our watch emulators roundup, is still the clearest case of all. An emulation core plus a loaded ROM sitting in memory for an entire session is exactly the workload that a memory ceiling breaks first. More headroom helps it directly.
The catch: Apple won't say how much the GPU actually improved
Samsung told us the Galaxy Watch 9's GPU was 19% faster. Apple has told us none of that for the S11. "Most powerful wearable chip" is a marketing line, not a number, and it's worth being honest about that gap in what we actually know. The RAM increase is confirmed and meaningful. Whether the GPU underneath it is a real step forward or a minor tune of the S10 is something we won't know for certain until real benchmarks and teardowns land.
Where this leaves things across all three watches
Three major watch refreshes landed within about a month of each other this year, and each company picked a different half of the same problem to solve. Google fixed memory and left the chip alone on the Pixel Watch 5. Samsung fixed the chip and left memory alone on the Galaxy Watch 9. Apple did both at once on Series 12 and Ultra 4, starting from a platform that already had the more demanding standalone game catalog to begin with.
If you're choosing a watch based on gaming today, that combination is hard to ignore. If you're choosing based on what's actually installed on your wrist right now, the RAM ceiling that has quietly shaped Wear OS and watchOS gaming for years just moved further on Apple's side than it did on either Android watch this cycle.
