The Apple Watch has a problem no software update can fix. It’s still the most accurate wearable I’ve tested, but needing to recharge it daily means it often gets stuck on a charger overnight, which is when some of the most valuable health metrics are collected.

As wearables increasingly compete on long-term health insights instead of workout stats alone, battery life is Apple’s biggest weakness. Smart rings like the Oura Ring and screenless bands like the Whoop and Fitbit Air have carved out a niche by doing the opposite of the Apple Watch: disappearing. They stay on your body for a week or more at a time, collecting health trends that a smartwatch misses while it’s sitting on a charger.

I’ve tested dozens of wearables, and recommend the Apple Watch over other smartwatches because it consistently comes out on top in my heart rate testing. But despite years of trying, I’ve never managed to wear one to bed consistently. 

Apple’s smartwatch only takes about an hour to charge, but between late-night deadlines, kids and an unpredictable schedule, I’ve never developed a reliable charging routine ahead of overnight wear. Sooner or later, I either forget to charge it or forget to put it back on before bed. I’m not alone. I’ve spoken with researchers, athletes and friends who chose another wearable simply because they could wear it around the clock.

Apple is leaving an opportunity on the table. Not because the Apple Watch isn’t good enough, but because it’s asking too much of those who wear it. A low-maintenance wearable like a smart ring that complements the Apple Watch could be the missing piece.

Battery life is hard to solve

Accuracy isn’t just about having better sensors. It’s a balancing act between sensor quality, software algorithms and sampling frequency (how often the device measures your vitals). The Apple Watch excels at all three. Its optical sensors, algorithms and near-continuous heart rate sampling during workouts consistently outperform other wearables in my testing. They’re also why the battery drains so quickly.

By contrast, smart rings are a completely different design and have their own compromises. Their smaller batteries mean they take less frequent samples, which is fine overnight when your vitals aren’t changing much, but less ideal for capturing sudden spikes during interval training. 

In my testing of the Oura Ring 5, its measurement of my peak heart rate during a 3-mile run was 8 beats per minute lower than a chest strap (the gold standard), though average heart rate was nearly identical. The Apple Watch, by comparison, tracked almost identically with the chest strap even during those peaks.

Apple struggles to keep the hardware on your wrist

Apple’s sensors and software can already surface many of the same long-term health insights as a smart ring. The Vitals app flags signs of illness when one or more health signals are out of range, and tracks menstrual cycles and recovery metrics. The problem is that those insights depend on consistent overnight wear. That means you have to remember to charge it before bed, and not accidentally forget it on the charger (it’s me!). 

Apple’s retrospective ovulation estimates, for example, require at least five consecutive nights of sleep tracking to establish a temperature baseline, and roughly two full menstrual cycles of nightly wear to unlock ovulation estimates. And upgrading to a newer model or resetting your watch means starting the whole process over.

Compare that with the Oura Ring 5, which lasts a week or more on your finger uninterrupted before needing a charge. Even if I happen to forget to wear it on the night it’s charging, I don’t have to reset my baseline. It just picks up where I left off. That means I can see my ovulation data as it happens and not retroactively like the Apple Watch. As a woman trying to better understand my cycle, that continuity has made it much easier to connect the dots between my hormones, sleep, recovery and workouts.

Can the Apple Watch have its cake and eat it too?

There are battery advancements trickling down the pipe. Silicon-carbon-based battery technologies — which allow for more battery capacity without increasing its size — could eventually make their way from phones to a wearable like the Apple Watch. More efficient processors like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear Elite also promise incremental battery gains for this year’s wearables. Apple uses its own chipsets, but it’s likely taking notes. 

Even those improvements aren’t likely to push the Apple Watch anywhere near the week-long battery life that Garmin watches, smart rings and screenless fitness bands deliver on. At least not anytime soon.

If Apple wants week-long battery life without sacrificing the Apple Watch’s accuracy, it will probably need to develop an entirely new wearable device. A ring would likely require giving up some workout-tracking precision compared to the Apple Watch or a thicker, sensor-based band, but for me, it’d be a worthy sacrifice. Believe me, I don’t need another band on my wrist. 

The winning formula, based on my experience testing both side by side, would be a watch-ring combo: the watch for notifications, workouts and live training data and the ring for everything that happens when you’re not out and about. While that does mean buying multiple devices, Samsung already supports combining health data when wearing both the Galaxy Ring and Galaxy Watch. Google’s also doing something similar with the Fitbit Air, which can be worn in tandem with the Pixel Watch.

Leg-up, but late to the game

Apple wouldn’t be starting from scratch with a smart ring. It already has much of the health infrastructure in place through the Health app, years of biometric algorithms and more than a decade of Apple Watch development. The company has even proven it can shrink heart rate sensors into a tiny earbud without sacrificing accuracy. In my testing, the AirPods Pro 3 tracked surprisingly close to a Polar chest strap during workouts, second only to the Apple Watch.

The challenge isn’t whether Apple could build a ring; it’s whether it could catch up. Oura and Whoop have spent nearly a decade refining not just the hardware, but the way people understand their health. They’ve turned complex biometrics, such as cardiovascular health, into concepts like “cardiovascular age” that are easier to understand and act on. Who doesn’t want to shave a few years off their heart?

Oura also owns a significant share of the smart ring market and hasn’t hesitated to go after anyone who gets too close. The company has pursued patent litigation against competitors Samsung and Ultrahuman, making it clear to any newcomer that there are already high stakes in this game.

Can’t beat ’em, buy ’em

If it ever wanted to bypass the legal drama, skip years of hardware development and instantly gain a mature ring platform by buying one, Oura would be the obvious target. It’s the same playbook Google used when it acquired Fitbit in 2019.

The two companies already share more DNA than you might expect. Oura has become something of a landing spot for Apple talent, including former Apple hardware executive Brian Lynch, former Apple health lead Ricky Bloomfield and designer Miklu Silvanto, who previously worked under Jony Ive.

But it’s not Apple’s style. The company has historically preferred building its products from the ground up rather than acquiring them outright.

Will we ever get an Apple Ring?

Apple has flirted with the idea of its own smart ring for years, filing patents dating back to 2015 for finger-worn devices that cover everything from biometric sensors and NFC to gesture controls for AR headsets. But patents aren’t products, and many of Apple’s filed designs never see the light of day.

The biggest argument against an Apple Ring has always been cannibalization. In October 2024, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple had no active plans to build one because executives worried it would eat into Apple Watch sales. And sure, asking people to spend an extra $300 (or more) on a ring on top of a roughly $400 Apple Watch is a lot to ask. 

But after testing both, I don’t think they’re solving the same problem. One wins at workouts, notifications and live metrics. The other collects long-term health data in the background. And with the global smart ring market projected to grow from $519 million in 2026 to $3.77 billion by 2034, according to Fortune Business Insights, it’s a category that’s becoming hard to ignore. Apple has already successfully expanded a product category with minimal cannibalization of sales: the iPod. At one point, there was an iPod Classic, iPod Shuffle and iPod Nano.

Even Gurman has since softened his stance. In a mid-2025 Power On newsletter, he argued that Apple should seriously consider a smart ring. And with incoming Apple CEO John Ternus, a longtime hardware engineer who helped oversee the Apple Watch, AirPods and Vision Pro, the company may be entering another hardware-focused chapter.

If I had to bet, I’d still say Apple doubles down on the Apple Watch in the near term rather than introducing a whole new category. Better batteries, more efficient chips and new health features.

But in the longer term, a ring doesn’t seem so far-fetched anymore. And if my Infinite Loop — my name for the hypothetical Apple Ring — ever becomes a reality, I’ll be first in line.