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This autumn, Apple releases watchOS 10, the tenth-generation software for the Apple Watch, which went on sale in Spring 2015. In that time, there have been big developments in hardware, including the addition of an always-on display, Watches that connect direct to the mobile phone network, health advances like ECG, blood oxygen measurements, fall detection and more. And the software has been upgraded hugely, too, including new ways to interact with the Watch. Kevin Lynch, Apple’s Vice President of Technology, and Deidre Caldbeck, Director of Apple Watch Product Marketing, sat down exclusively with The Independent to talk about how things have changed. What’s been consistent over the years is that unlike many other devices, the all-day proximity means the Watch offers benefits without you interacting with it at all. Simply wearing it allows the Watch to monitor your heart rate and let you know if something’s amiss. In fact, the heart rate monitor was built into the first Apple Watch – at a time when few other wearables had such a sensor – for a more mundane task. Lynch explains, “We decided to focus on the heart in the early days, to get accurate calorimetry.” In other words, while most smart watches counted the calories you were burning through knowing your height and likely stride length, the Apple Watch was more precise because it took your exertions into account. “We built the sensor and showed you a way to view your heart rate. We didn’t really think that in itself was going to be compelling because you can measure your heart rate yourself just by putting your finger on your wrist and counting. But we found some people were looking at the heart rate and, when it looked weird, they talked to their doctor and found they discovered something about their health that they weren’t aware of. They started writing us letters about this – and we are still getting them today.” This led to Apple searching for ways to make the heart rate measurements more powerful. The Watch can now let you know if it spots your heart rate unexpected high or low, and led to sleep tracking and more recently monitoring overnight respiratory rate. This autumn will also see a focus on mental health as well as physical. The Watch already has meditation capabilities in the Mindfulness app but this will expand with a place to log emotions and daily moods. The Medications app will be able to send reminders if taking your medication hasn’t been logged on schedule. But Apple Watch has always reached beyond its health capabilities, major though those are. Lynch goes on, “Our question was also, how do we enable your Watch to be a key to the world?” This led to Apple Pay, so a double-tap on the side button lets you pay at a card reader, show a boarding pass, unlock a car or a hotel room and so on. Beyond that, Lynch says, “We look at how do we continue improving the experience, having the willingness to rethink and re-imagine, based on what our users are telling us.” That’s timely because this autumn there will be big changes in how the Watch will be used, even down to what individual buttons do. The new software sees the arrival of widgets on the Watch. Widgets are those highly useful items on a computer desktop or phone home screen that show updateable information. So, where the Fitness app on the iPhone shows a generic image, the Fitness widget tells you exactly how active you’ve been today, for instance. Or the widget for an app like the flight tracking app, Flighty, reminds you how many days until your next flight, or if it’s behind schedule. This is highly useful as previously most extra information on the Watch has been shown through complications, those little areas of some Watch faces that can show the date, today’s temperature, battery charge and so on. Those remain, but with watchOS 10, by turning the Digital Crown, a new stack of widgets scroll up on to the display. This means you can have a spare, simple Watch face but easy access to lots of stuff. Lynch explains, “We can show information with the Smart Stack. You can have a beautiful face like the Palette or Snoopy or whichever graphical face you’d like and have that extra information easily. Internally we called that ‘cake’, as in ‘have your cake and eat it too’.” The Snoopy and Woodstock Watch face, looks like it will be another highlight of watchOS 10, by the way. But this change means that the functions of the buttons have changed. Control Centre is the place where you turn your Watch to silent when you go to the theatre (you do remember to do this, don’t you?) or ping your iPhone when you can’t find it, for instance. It’s very useful and right now you invoke it by swiping up on the display, though this only works from the Watch’s home screen. With watchOS 10, you can’t do this any more, instead pressing the side button. The big benefit is it now works from any screen on the Watch, not just the home screen. But it’s a big change, which could be confusing for users. How carefully does Apple think about making these modifications? Caldbeck says, “It’s a big change but it’s worthwhile making and that is what comes into play when we make a decision like that. We think, how can we continue to evolve and improve the experience? And how can we take the things that you love about Apple Watch and make them better? “And sometimes it does mean we have to change something about the way you interact with the Watch to make it better. The side button is a really good example. We have tried different things with the side button, over the years. We originally had the friends circle so you could contact people close to you. And we know that Apple Pay is really compelling. But when you ask what are some of the other things that users need access to anytime, anywhere, that really that ends up being Control Centre.” Before you panic, this doesn’t mean that Apple Pay is about to change. As Lynch explains, “That is hardware-instrumented so it’s not only down to software. The double-press is wired at a low level physically and electronically so that you can’t fake it out. It means that no software can pretend that you’re trying to buy something, you have to have the double press to activate it at a low level. So, if we did want to change that, it would be quite extensive.” Apple is clearly careful when it comes to these changes. So, how do they come about? Lynch’s reply confirms the thoughtfulness. “Part of how we do this is we start with storytelling, until we get to a place where we think, wow, that would be really cool if the future was like that. Then we try it out. So, we’ll build prototypes, and carry them around ourselves. And it’s this stage, which we call ‘the carry’, where we live with the changes ourselves over time. Some of these things might initially feel strange but after a day or two you start feeling like, oh well, this is obvious now, it’s totally natural, and then people don’t want to go back. That’s when we know that we’ve got a good thing here.” Hardware and software are so thoroughly integrated, so I finally ask how many decisions come back to the battery. Lynch explains, “The way we look at power management comes at the beginning of each release and it’s a multi-year road map. We use the battery model as a fundamental element in talking about the features, we’re going to do. Everything we do has a power budget and we look to save power with other ideas to optimise power, so, we have some focused work each year to improve battery life from a software perspective, And then we invest some of those savings into new features that we are now able to do. “That’s combined with the hardware team working on battery, packaging, chemistry and all the electronics. The system on a chip from the silicon team continues to have improvements on power requirements. Part of how we did the always-on display was through the hardware, silicon and display teams working together and really was key to enabling it. “We have battery models that model average user activities. We call it ‘a day in the life’ and it represents the way many users use Apple Watch. We model the battery consumption we have quite ambitious targets each year. The battery life work is super obsessive.” The Apple Watch routinely lasts longer than a full day, of course. But battery anxiety is the malady of the twenty-first century, so it’s good to know Apple is serious about this. There’s plenty more to the new Watch software, from more advanced cycling workouts to automatically generated waypoints for hikers to NameDrop, where you tap your Watch on someone’s iPhone or Watch to transfer your contact details. The software will go on general release in the autumn, with a public beta version available next month. Read More Apple Watch 7 pre-order: How to buy the new smartwatch in the UK Apple introduces new version of Watch with complete redesign iPhone 13 - live: UK contract deals and prices for Apple, EE and O2 Apple seeks trademark of ‘actual apple’, Swiss fruit association says The new iPhone could have a major clue about Apple’s headset Man locked out of smart home for a week after he was accused of being racist

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Amazon Prime Video will include advertising during shows and movies starting early next year, joining other streaming services that have added different tiers of subscriptions. Members of Amazon Prime can pay $2.99 per month in the U.S. to keep their service ad-free, the company said Friday. Amazon said limited advertisements will be aired during shows and movies starting early next year so that it can “continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time.” Ads in Prime Video content will start in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Canada in early 2024, followed by France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, and Australia later in the year.

Electric car maker Tesla’s profits took a dive in the third quarter, according to an earnings call on Wednesday in which the company’s chief Elon Musk blamed staff working from home for being “detached from reality”. Tesla’s profits in Q3 of 2023 have plunged by over 40 per cent compared to the gains it made in the same period last year after the company slashed its car prices by around 25 per cent in an attempt to compete with other EV makers. The EV manufacturer reported a net profit of about $1.9bn for the time between July through September, which is a 44 percent drop from the $3.3bn it made in the same three-month period last year. While the company has seen a small increase in overall revenue of about $23bn from the $21bn the same time last year, the figures are still lower than Wall Street expectations. Mr Musk also dampened hopes of the company’s anticipated Cybertruck reviving profits in the near future, announcing that it would take at least 18 months for the truck to become profitable as it could go on sale only by the end of November. “There will be enormous challenges in reaching volume production with Cybertruck and making the Cybertruck cash flow positive,” the Tesla titan told investors and analysts in the earnings call. “The blood, sweat and tears that will be required to achieve that is just staggering,” he added. Over the last year, Tesla has slashed the prices of its cars by quarter to boost sales. Growing competition with the introduction of EVs by other car makers in the US, including BMW, Toyota, Mercedes, GM and Hyundai, has also coincided with Tesla’s share of vehicles in the EV market reducing in the last quarter. In the earnings call, Mr Musk also said staff working from home are taking advantage of those who cannot work from home. “Like... what about all the people that have to come to the factory and build the cars?” he asked. “Why did I sleep in the factory so many times? Because it mattered,” the Tesla chief said. Mr Musk echoed the statements he made in an interview with CNN earlier this year in which he called remote work “morally wrong”, arguing that it is unfair to those who cannot have the option. “Get off the goddamn moral high horse with the work-from-home bullshit,” he said. Tesla also pointed fingers at its reduction in production while it upgraded its factories as one of the factors behind the profit slump. It said it has also been making big investments in AI and “commissioned one of the world’s largest supercomputers.” “We have more than doubled the size of our AI training compute, accommodating for both our growing data set & Optimus, which is currently being trained for simple tasks through AI rather than hardcoded software, while its hardware continues to improve,” Tesla said. But all is not gloomy as the company says the first deliveries of its Cybertruck are scheduled for 30 November and Tesla’s Model Y remains the “best-selling vehicle of any kind” in Europe. Read More X begins charging new users to post as part of trial EU asks Elon Musk to ‘walk the talk’ on X/Twitter disinformation over Hamas attack AOC wants to ‘trade in’ her Tesla for union-made electric vehicle amid historic auto workers strike Amazon to start dropping packages into people’s gardens using drones in the UK Facebook has stopped working Facial recognition firm Clearview AI overturns UK data privacy fine