If you’ve been planning on buying an Apple Watch Series 9, today seems like a good time to take the plunge. The smartwatch is currently available for $299 at several retailers including Amazon, Best Buy, Target and Walmart. That’s not quite the lowest price we’ve ever seen – some colorways briefly dropped to $269 earlier this month, for example – but deeper discounts have generally been unusual. This deal saves you about $30 off the watch’s typical street price on Amazon, and that’s $100 less than if you bought the watch directly from Apple. At the time of writing, the offer is valid for the 41 mm version of the watch without cellular in the colors Midnight, Red, Silver or Starlight. It applies to models with a rubber, S/M or M/L sports band or a nylon sports strap.
Photo by Cherlynn Low/Engadget
This is one of the lowest prices we’ve seen for Apple’s latest wearable.
$299 at Amazon
We gave the Apple Watch Series 9 a score of 92 in our review last September, and it’s currently the top pick in our guide to the best smartwatches. It runs fast, is waterproof, and can still do many tasks that would normally require an iPhone, from checking iMessages to calling Siri to using Apple Pay. Most of the key health and fitness tracking features are also still present, as are safety-related tools like fall detection and an emergency SOS feature. Compared to the cheaper Apple Watch SE, it has a slightly larger display that can always be left on, making reading the time at a glance less cumbersome.
New to this model is the convenient double-tap feature, which allows you to respond to notifications without having to physically touch the device, and the ability to make many Siri requests on the device without having to be online all the time. It also has twice as much internal storage (64GB) as the Series 8 and the peak display brightness (2,000 nits) is twice as high.
However, the usual caveats still apply to any Apple Watch. The whole thing only works with iPhones. The battery lasts almost a full day, but not much longer. There are better ways to track sleep. Due to an ongoing patent dispute, Apple also had to disable the watch’s blood oxygen monitoring feature. In general, if you own an Apple Watch today and are still happy with it, there isn’t much need to switch. However, if you’re looking to upgrade today, this should be a good value.
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