2025 Apple Watches Still Use the S10 Chip

Another big surprise is that, despite Apple introducing three new Apple Watch models yesterday, the company has chosen to overtly acknowledge that the silicon inside hasn’t changed.

Over the past eight years, Apple has frequently used the same silicon in its Apple Watch updates. However, it typically repackages them, resulting in new chip designations. For instance, while the Apple Watch Series 5 used the same T8006 silicon inside as the S4 chip in the Series 4, Apple merely repackaged it and called it the S5.

The same happened with the Series 6, Series 7, and Series 8 models, which used S6, S7, and S8 chips that were all T8301 silicon inside. While the S9 was a nice upgrade to an S9/T8310 that featured a neural engine to power new features like Double Tap and on-device Siri processing, the S10 was just another version of that same silicon.

The conventional wisdom was that Apple would do the same for this year’s S11. However, it turns out that it didn’t even go that far; the Apple Watch Series 11, Ultra 3, and SE 3 are all listed as having the identical S10 chip used in last year’s Apple Watch Series 10.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, since even an “S11” chip wouldn’t have represented a meaningful performance boost. If anything, we respect that Apple is being more transparent about what it’s doing here.