Apple Watch Series Two comes with waterproofing and GPS

Two years after Apple launched its first wearable, the company has pulled the dust sheets from the second-generation of its Watch. As for what’s different, it’s certainly not what’s on the outside, and at first glance it looks the same as its immediate predecessor. The headline feature is that the device is water resistant to depths of 50 meters and can be used to track the activity of swimmers. The second standout upgrade is the addition of built-in GPS which, the company promises won’t make you wait around like other GPS running watches.

The company has entirely redesigned the watch for its second series, adding in a dual-core processor that pushes graphics twice as fast as its parent. It’s smart enough to grind pixels at 60 frames per second and the company’s Jeff Williams reveals that it has the brightest display Apple has ever shipped. At over 1,000 nits, it should deal with many of the hurdles that come with using a smart device in bright sunlight.

Apple is also adding another case material for the second-generation of its Watch, producing a Ceramic edition. Alongside which, you’ll find a new premium option that’s produced with Hermes and, best of all, a Nike+ Edition that looks like the sneaker firm’s old Nike+ SportsWatch watches. It’s entirely plausible that this was one of the reasons that Nike withdrew from the wearables market, knowing ahead of time of Apple’s potential plans.

Back in August, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo released the first in a long series of reports claiming inside knowledge of what Apple was cooking. At the time he claimed that the second-generation Watch would gain faster internals, GPS, barometer, better waterproofing and a bigger battery. As the event itself has shown, he was pretty much on the ball, which makes a mockery of Tim Cook’s historic promise to “double down on secrecy.”

The fact that the Apple Watch comes from the world’s most famous technology company means that the device has come under a lot of scrutiny. Plenty has been written about how the unit serves an indictment of Tim Cook’s leadership, but that doesn’t seem to match the reality. The Watch tops the quarterly smartwatch sales charts, and isn’t too far away from Fitbit in the overall wearables market. Fitbit, of course, produces significantly more devices at a wider variety of prices, so that’s saying a lot. For a device that’s been called a flop on more than one occasion, it’s certainly not behaving like one. At today’s event, Apple revealed that it is now the second biggest watch brand in the world, and the first in the Smartwatch world.

The Apple Watch Series Two will launch on September 16th, with the prices starting at $369. The Nike+ edition of the device will also start at $369, but won’t begin shipping until late October.

Apple is also rejigging the first generation of its wearable so that it can hang around as a low-end option. The re-titled Apple Watch Series One will get the same dual-core processor as its elder sibling, but will retail for $269.

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