The Apple Watch Series 3 Is Now Officially a ‘Vintage’ Product
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Pour one out for the Apple Watch Series 3, as Apple has just officially added the venerable wearable to its vintage products list, marking the end of an era for the most long-lived Apple Watch ever sold.
While the Apple Watch Series 3 may seem quaint by today’s standards, it marked several important milestones in Apple’s wearable ambitions. Released in 2017, it was the first Apple Watch to offer cellular capability. Since its size left no room for even the smallest physical nano-SIM card, it also became the first Apple device to use an eSIM, a year before Apple introduced the technology to the iPhone XS in 2018, and five years before the SIM-less iPhone 14 was released in 2022.
It’s hard to understate how much of a difference this made in untethering the Apple Watch from the iPhone. Users could go for runs without dragging their iPhone along and not worry about being cut off from receiving calls or messages. It even allowed for things like streaming music and podcasts on the go.
While it would be a few more years before the Apple Watch got its own App Store and Family Setup for folks without their own iPhone, there’s little doubt that the Apple Watch Series 3 was the first big step in turning the wearable into a more independent device.
The Apple Watch Series 3 was also the first to feature a dual-core processor and a new W2 wireless chip, providing improved Wi-Fi capabilities and further untethering it from its companion iPhone. A barometric altimeter for measuring elevation during hikes and walks, plus improved health sensors, enabled more accurate fitness tracking features.
On the flip side, it was also the last model to feature the original Apple Watch design, in 38 mm and 42 mm sizes. In 2018, Apple ushered in larger screens with the Apple Watch Series 4 — a watershed device in its own right — and they’ve been slowly growing larger ever since.
Although the Apple Watch Series 3 was released in 2017, it’s had a longer lifespan than most; Apple continued selling it through official channels until September 2022, meaning it spent an unprecedented five years on the market. That’s more than double that of any other Apple Watch model, and only a handful of other products share that distinction, including the iPod classic (2007–2014), the “trashcan” Mac Pro (2013–2019), and the fourth-generation Apple TV (2015–2022).
This made the Series 3 effectively the “entry-level” Apple Watch for five years, meaning many folks had their first Apple Watch experience with it.
What’s interesting is that we’ve typically seen Apple classify products as vintage when they’ve been off the market for about five years, which makes the Apple Watch Series 3 appear to be an exception. However, the catch here is that Apple’s timeline is a little more complicated than simply when it last sold a device. The clock actually starts when Apple “stopped distributing them for sale.”
More specifically, Apple’s rule is that products become vintage five to seven years after they stop being distributed to sales channels — not simply when the buy button disappears from the Apple online store.
With the Apple Watch Series 3, it’s quite likely that Apple stopped manufacturing new models more than five years ago, and Apple Stores continued to sell off existing inventory for another two years. This aligns with the release of the first Apple Watch SE in 2020, which quickly became a significantly better value than the aging Series 3. It’s hard to imagine Apple running a third production line to continue making Series 3 models once it began churning out the new SE.
Still, the Apple Watch Series 3 has cemented its place in Apple history as a budget-friendly workhorse that introduced millions to the Apple Watch and paved the way for the eSIM future we now take for granted.
