How big can the Apple Watch go?

I’ve been thinking about where wrist wearables are going to go in the next decade, basing it off what went before with the iPhone. I’ve been playing with an Apple Watch Series 3 (38mm, the smallest model) for the past few weeks now and really enjoying it for a lot of use cases. However, I’m noticing that the screen is just too small for a range of items.

Most notably, the ‘home’ screen. Here’s one of two main screens I use as ‘home’. It’s got: calendar, time, weather, breathe, activity, workout all as options you can click on to access - with weather being a real-time update. I’m finding that it’s 1-2 apps short thought of most of my use cases: I’d love another app to select music, or my podcasts.

However, the other one I’m finding surprisingly useful is the Siri ‘home’ screen. On here, Siri is using some monitoring of regular activities to highlight what apps, etc. are next. It’s turning out to be quite smart at pushing items to the screen that are of relevance.

Where am I coming from with the iPhone?

Firstly, let us go back even further, and admire the screen on that Nokia handset, a Nokia E51. This had a 5.08cm (2 inches, or 12.4sq cm) screen in September 2007 and was a ‘cutting edge’ phone from Nokia. The original iPhone, released in June of the same year looked enormous in comparison with it’s 8.89cm (3.5-inch, or 36.5sq cm) screen, an almost 3x increase in space (36.5 to 12.4sq cm).

However, that was only the beginning. The largest iPhone you can purchase now, an iPhone 11 Pro Max with an 16.51cm (6.5-inches, or 102.9sq cm). That’s an almost 3x increase in space again over the original iPhone, and an EIGHT-X increase from the Nokia. However, the iPhone Pro Max models are more of a niche so lets revert and use the ‘standard’ model with it’s 14.83cm (5.8-inches or 84.4sq cm) which would be a 2.3x increase on the original iPhone.

So…. if we look at Apple Watch now. Unfortunately, they’ve complicated matters by releasing two screen sizes at the start, however as I have a 38mm Series 3 in my hand, I’ll go with that. It originally started out with a 3.4cm (1.337 inches, or 563sq mm) screen. If we extrapolated out from that we go to a 5.67cm (2.22-inches, or 1.3sq cm). The current watch screen is roughly 2.38cm width and the same height. If we were to modify and expand the screen then, we’re limited by the width of people’s wrists so will keep the height the same. Therefore, that means a 5.47 width on your wrist, more than twice as wide as the current screen. Now we’re talking!

With that, you could run the screen I have above, with the Siri home screen alongside, and have some space for a few extra apps. As well as a huge amount of extra room for reading details, etc.

Which is where we end up with an example such as below:

Personally, I look forward to this in the future. We’re only at the beginning of what wrist wearables will do and this screen would open up so much potential.

Imagine being on a run, and being able to see a map alongside running data? The bigger battery would also help with battery life also (even accounting for the larger screen)….