Performance & Wireless
You shouldn’t expect any major performance gains from the Apple Watch Series 5 over the Series 4. Although the new model sports an upgraded 64-bit dual-core S5 chip, Apple still only promises it as “up to 2x faster” than the Series 3’s S3 processor — the same spec that it advertised for last year’s S4. While the S5 undoubtedly offers other impvoements, most likely in terms of power consumption for the sake of the always-on display, it’s not going to make the Series 5 watch run any faster than it did before.
The wireless protocols also remain completely unchanged from the Series 4, with the same LTE and UMTS support on the cellular models, standard 802.11b/g/n support that only operates at 2.4GHz, and not 5GHz, and Bluetooth 5.0. The latter is a nice boost over the S3’s Bluetooth 4.2, but is unchanged from the Series 4. In fact, the same W3 Apple wireless chip is used in both models.