The Smartwatch Wars Are About to Heat Up
With Apple's September 14 event days away, the Apple Watch Series 7 is set to face off against Fitbit's Sense and Versa 3 in a fast-growing category.
Two days from now Apple holds its big September event, and the Apple Watch is expected to get most of the attention alongside whatever iPhone news drops. The rumor mill has been pretty consistent for weeks: Series 7 should bring a larger always-on display, which sounds like a modest bump on paper but could actually be the most meaningful change to the Watch’s usability since always-on arrived in the first place. Reading a message or checking your heart rate without doing the wrist-flip is a small thing until you do it a hundred times a day.
What’s interesting is who Apple is actually competing against right now. It’s not really other general-purpose smartwatches — Wear OS has been limping along, and nothing from that ecosystem has put real pressure on Apple. The more direct competition is Fitbit, specifically the Sense and the Versa 3. Fitbit built its whole identity around fitness and sleep tracking long before Apple took it seriously, and it shows: the Sense in particular leans hard into stress tracking, skin temperature, and an ECG app, chasing a “wellness device” positioning rather than trying to be a smartphone on your wrist.
That distinction matters more than it used to. The pandemic pushed a huge number of people to buy their first fitness tracker or smartwatch, not because they wanted notifications on their arm but because gyms closed and people got obsessive about sleep, resting heart rate, and general health metrics from home. That demand hasn’t slowed down — if anything it normalized wearables for a demographic that previously saw them as a novelty. A device that used to be a nice-to-have for runners is now something people justify buying for basic health monitoring alone.
Where this leaves the two products
Apple has the ecosystem advantage — if you own an iPhone, pairing anything other than an Apple Watch feels like a downgrade in a dozen small ways. But Fitbit has the specialization advantage: longer battery life on the Versa 3 and Sense, a company culture built entirely around tracking, and no pretense of being anything other than a health device. That focus is a real selling point for people who find the Apple Watch’s do-everything design more distracting than useful.
If the always-on display rumor holds up, Series 7 mostly closes a usability gap rather than opening a new one. It doesn’t obviously threaten what Fitbit does well. What it probably does is make the “which smartwatch” decision even more about ecosystem than about hardware specs — which is exactly the outcome you’d expect Apple to want. The bigger story to watch isn’t Wednesday’s keynote itself, it’s whether Google’s Fitbit acquisition (still working through regulatory review) eventually lets Fitbit’s health focus merge with broader smartphone integration. That would be the first move in years that actually reshapes this category instead of just iterating on it.