Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11: at €449 (295,000 FCFA), the newer watch is the one to buy if this is your first, because it listens to your heart far more closely and should age better. The older model still holds one card, though. Marked down to €349 at some retailers, it shows the same time on the same panel and gets through the same day. Already wearing one? Change nothing.
Introduction: Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11, two watches only the back can tell apart
On 18 September 2026, Apple did two things on the same day: it put the Apple Watch Series 12 on the shelves and pulled its predecessor from the French Apple Store. The entry price did not move by a cent. The swap had been set up at the 9 September keynote, and it leaves the Apple Watch Series 11 in the hands of resellers alone, who are clearing their stock at wildly uneven prices.
Hence this Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11 comparison, which does not go back over the spec list. Our two product sheets take care of that. Here we look at what the new model changes in an ordinary week: a jog on Tuesday, a night that ended too early, fifteen minutes on the charger snatched before heading out.
One thing to make clear. Nobody in our newsroom has worn either watch. The impressions reported below come from reviews by The Verge, CNET, Engadget, TechRadar, Fnac Lab and Clubic, backed up by the price tracking that Consomac publishes.
Verdict in brief: the Series 12 by a whisker, the Series 11 at the right price
Got thirty seconds? The whole Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11 contest fits into the two blocks below. The final score is tight, and that is deliberate: a tenth of a point separates two watches that a hundred euros can easily push the other way.
Verdict in 30 seconds
For the price its predecessor launched at, the Series 12 tracks the heart far more closely, adds the Readiness score and charges faster. The gain stays thin for anyone already wearing a Series 11, and part of the audio features is missing in Europe.
For whom iPhone owners buying their first Apple Watch, regular runners and anyone replacing a Series 9 or older.
Avoid if You already wear a Series 10 or 11, you can find the Series 11 at €350 or less and do no serious sport, or your phone runs Android.
We like
- Pulse read every five seconds
- Readiness score free, with no subscription
- Fifteen minutes of charging for twelve hours of use
- Ceramic Shield 2 glass on aluminium cases
We like less
- Battery life still capped at 24 hours
- Live Rewind and Siri Recap missing in Europe
- Sold at full price, no discount before Black Friday
| Criterion | Apple Watch Series 12 GPS 42 mm | Apple Watch Series 11 GPS 42 mm |
|---|---|---|
| Design | Aluminium, titanium or ceramic | Aluminium or titanium |
| Display | LTPO3 OLED, 2,000 nits | LTPO3 OLED, 2,000 nits |
| Chip | S11 | S10 (2024) |
| Health | Pulse every 5 s, Readiness | Hypertension alerts, sleep score |
| Battery | 24 h (38 h in Low Power) | 24 h (38 h in Low Power) |
| Fast charging | 12 h of use in 15 min | 8 h of use in 15 min |
| watchOS | Full watchOS 27 | watchOS 27 without Readiness |
| Price | €449, no discount | €329 to €449 depending on the shop |
| Rounds won | 5 | 1 |
Design: across the dinner table, nobody will know which one you have on
Picture a dinner. The person next to you wears an Apple Watch, and so do you. Which of the two came out this year? Nobody at the table will guess, your neighbour included. Same rounded rectangle 9.7 mm thick, same crown, same 42 and 46 mm sizes. You have to flip the cases over to settle it.
On the scales, the recent one puts on 1.9 g in the small aluminium size, at 32.2 g against 30.3 g. No published review claims to feel it, nights included. According to the first hands-on reports in the press, bands bought for one slide onto the other.
The difference that matters sits in the glass of the aluminium versions, the ones that sell most. Think about what a wrist goes through in a year: the handlebar of a motorbike taxi gripped tight in Douala, a car door, the rough render of a wall you walked a little too close to. The Series 11 covers its panel with Ion-X glass and a ceramic coating. The Series 12 moves to Ceramic Shield 2, said to be 60% tougher. That figure comes from the manufacturer, and no independent lab has put it to the test. We file it under promises.
First round of this Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11 match: advantage to the newcomer, narrowly. A five-euro screen protector stuck on the older watch closes the gap further. Materials and colours, including the ceramic edition at more than €1,000, are covered in the sheet for the 2026 model.
Display at high noon: one panel for two watches
Midday, a terrace with no parasol, the sun straight overhead. This is the ordeal every smartwatch dreads, and it is where the Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11 match fizzles out. Both share an identical OLED panel, pushed to 2,000 nits outdoors and brought down to 1 nit in the dark so that it wakes nobody in the middle of the night.
Fnac Lab, which measured the Series 11, points out that some rivals now climb to 3,000 nits. It still judges Apple’s screen readable everywhere. Reviews of the Series 12 add nothing to that. Makes sense.
A draw. On the screen, Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11 has no winner, and anyone eyeing the older model on sale gives up not a single pixel.
Good to know — Choosing the size weighs more than choosing the generation. The 46 mm gives you nearly a quarter more screen area, while the 42 mm gets in the way less when you sleep. On the Series 12, the large size costs €499 (about 327,000 FCFA), twenty euros more than its 2025 equivalent.
Performance: Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11 during Tuesday night intervals
Ten times one minute fast, one minute slow. You start the workout and watch for your pulse. On the Series 12, CNET saw it appear in roughly half a second. On the older watch you wait several seconds, long enough to run a few dozen metres blind.
That detail sums up the speed chapter of Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11. The S11 chip replaces an S10 that dated from 2024. MacRumors credits it with twice the memory, at 4 GB, which Apple has not confirmed. In the menus, nobody can see the difference. TechRadar had already measured no speed gain between the Series 10 and the Series 11, and not one review describes the latter as slow. Paying for a taxi with a tap or setting a timer for the rice: same response on both.
For positioning, Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11 ends in a tie, with single-frequency GPS on both sides. Between the towers of the Plateau district in Abidjan, the track will be less clean than an Ultra’s. Fnac Lab nevertheless got routes from the Series 11 that were as faithful as those of dual-band watches.
One black mark for the new model. Clubic reports that a few buyers are complaining of unexpected restarts on brand-new units. Apple has said nothing.
The Series 12 takes this round for a simple reason: headroom. A watch bought today will be in service until 2030, and the AI features Apple is preparing are hungry for memory.
Health and sport: the morning score the older watch will never show
Seven o’clock. You slept badly and the plan says long run. Go or stay in? The Series 12 answers with a number. Its Readiness app rates your form from 0 to 10 by cross-checking sleep, training load, resting pulse, breathing, temperature and heart rate variability. The Series 11 records almost all of that, without handing out the score.
This is the only real gulf in the Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11 contest, and its cause is hardware. The sensors pressed against the skin have been redone, so heart rate now comes in twelve times a minute, from the moment you get up until you go to bed. The Verge’s reviewer strapped a Polar H10 around his chest as a yardstick: never more than five beats of difference. For a wrist, that is very good.
One caveat, because we like spoiling the party. Engadget never saw its score appear during its review, since Readiness asks for seven nights of wear before it commits to anything.
The older watch is anything but stripped bare. Electrocardiogram, blood oxygen, sleep apnoea detection, sleep marked out of 100 each morning: the 2025 toolkit is still complete, and Fnac Lab called its heart sensor a benchmark. Hypertension alerts work identically on both generations: no blood pressure reading on screen, a trend picked up over several weeks, then a doctor. Neither of these watches makes a diagnosis.
Readers outside Europe may enjoy a paradox here. Because its sensors are new, the Series 12 is waiting for fresh approval of its hypertension alerts in around thirty countries, with Canada and South Africa at the top of the list, according to Consomac and WatchGeneration. The Series 11, cleared since 2025, has no such delay. Neither France nor the rest of the European Union is affected. For Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire or Senegal, we found nothing reliable.
A clear win for the Series 12 if you run or ride to a plan. If the word recovery only makes you think of the sofa, the gap melts and Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11 goes back to being a matter of price. The detailed measurements for the 2025 generation are in our Series 11 sheet.
Battery: Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11 on a power-cut evening in Yaoundé
Seven in the evening and the power goes. The watch reads 15% and has to last the night to track your sleep. This is the moment Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11 stops being a draw.
Plugged into a power bank, the new one claws back up to twelve hours of use in a quarter of an hour. The older one recovers eight in the same time. Five minutes are enough for the Series 12 to cover a night of tracking. The Verge watched the gauge climb from 20 to 64% in twenty minutes. A shower and the morning coffee take over from the night on the charging puck.
For sheer stamina, Apple promises the same to both: 24 hours, 38 in Low Power Mode. But the elder of the two has a thicker file. More than 40 hours at Fnac Lab, about 36 at Clubic despite workouts over 4G, around thirty for Wired as relayed by Mac4Ever. As for the Series 12, reviews confirm a day and the night that follows, with no lab measurement as thorough so far. WatchGeneration did not see continuous pulse tracking weigh on the battery. Good news.
Endurance runners will read another line: ten hours of GPS workout for the new watch, eight for the old. A marathon fits on either.
A narrow victory for the Series 12, earned at the charger. Budget for a 20 W power adapter, which neither box includes. Anyone dreaming of a weekend away from a socket will have to aim for the Ultra, and pay double.
watchOS 27: Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11 on the software side, three weeks on
On 14 September, watchOS 27 landed on both watches. The sorting has turned out less cruel to the older model than people feared.
The Series 11 received the pinch gesture that scrolls through widgets without the other hand, handy when that hand is carrying the shopping. It also gains a standalone Workout Buddy coach that can do without the phone, and the unified Find My app. What it is denied: Readiness, the live pulse curve and sound recognition.
That last one is part of Audio Intelligence, exclusive to the 2026 model. The watch buzzes when a siren goes past or when someone rings the doorbell, and a widget names the music playing around you. Engadget finds it a little too jumpy. The two most talked-about features, Live Rewind and Siri Recap, do not exist yet: a beta is announced for the end of the year, in English, with nothing planned for the European Union according to WatchGeneration.
Same caution for the new Siri. It starts as a beta, in English, demands an iPhone 15 Pro or an iPhone 16 or later, and Apple’s documentation lists it as unavailable in the European Union for now. As for Workout Buddy, it only speaks English and Spanish. A reader in Europe who settled Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11 on the strength of the keynote demos would be buying promises.
Advantage Series 12, slimmer than expected. It should also get one more year of updates, although Apple commits to nothing. In both cases iOS 27 is required, which means an iPhone 11 at the very least. No Android phone will do.
Price: Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11, a hundred euros apart on good days
Let’s talk money, since that is where Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11 gets decided for most buyers. All the prices below were recorded in France.
The new watch costs €449 in 42 mm, everywhere, with no discount. The only offer we spotted, vouchers paid back to Fnac members, ended on 4 October. The older one no longer has an official price. It has the price of the shop and of the day.
The 2026 readings draw a sawtooth curve. €369 at Amazon in January. €329 (216,000 FCFA) at JoyBuy in June, the lowest known, flagged by WatchGeneration. €349 in July on almost every colour, according to Consomac. In late September, the same site spotted a silver 46 mm at €349. And yet in early October some chains were still listing certain colours at €449, the exact amount asked for the replacement. Paying that much for the model removed from the catalogue is a misfire.
Our Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11 grid for the 42 mm aluminium GPS models fits in three lines. Up to €350 (roughly 230,000 FCFA), the older model is the right buy, and the difference pays for a charger and a second band. Between €350 and €400, it holds its own if sport is a Sunday pastime. Past €400, you can buy the Series 12 with your eyes shut. In 46 mm, set the cursor at €380.
From Douala, Abidjan or Dakar, the Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11 sum shifts a little. Apple sells nothing directly there, so the watches travel in a suitcase or pass through an importer whose margin quickly swallows the hundred euros saved in Paris. No local price was on display when we looked. Three reflexes: demand the invoice, because the warranty applies in the country of purchase, check the serial number, and take the GPS version. The cellular variant costs €120 more (about 79,000 FCFA) and its eSIM only activates with partner carriers. The list Apple publishes has just two names for the whole continent, both in South Africa.
And resale? No serious second-hand value exists yet for the Series 12. Buying the older watch at €349 at least means the depreciation has already been taken.
This round goes to the Series 11, on one condition. With the same figure on both price tags, it flips without discussion. The full price history is in its product sheet.
Good to know — Wearing a Series 8 or older? watchOS 27 no longer installs on it. In that case Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11 is a false dilemma, because either one will feel like a leap forward. Take the Series 12 if you run, and the cheaper of the two if you don’t.
Pros and cons: Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11 in two lists
Apple Watch Series 12
Pros
- Pulse followed closely, within five beats of a chest strap according to The Verge
- Readiness fitness score, free of charge
- A quarter of an hour on the charger for half a day of use
- Glass better armed against knocks on the aluminium models
Cons
- One day of battery life, as before
- Live Rewind and Siri Recap pushed back, with no date for Europe
- No discount at retailers in early October
- A few restarts reported on brand-new units
Apple Watch Series 11
Pros
- The case and panel of the Series 12, like for like
- Real-world stamina beyond the official claim in three reviews
- Hypertension alerts approved wherever Apple offers them
- A hundred euros cheaper on sale days
Cons
- Neither Readiness nor close-interval heart readings, even after the update
- Slower to recharge
- Gone from the Apple Store, with sizes and colours running out
- Still listed at €449 by some chains
Detailed scores
Six shared criteria to score Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11. The last line for the Series 11 applies to a price tag of €350 or less.
Where to buy the Apple Watch Series 12 and the Series 11 at the best price
Last practical part of Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11: the shops. The Series 12 sells at list price in every chain. For the Series 11, compare two or three retailers and accept a less sought-after colour: the gap sometimes reaches a hundred euros for the very same watch.
Where to buy the Apple Watch Series 12 or Series 11 at the best price
- Apple Watch Series 12 GPS 42 mmLa Series 12 garde le design et l'écran de la Series 11 mais inaugure la puce S11 et des capteurs cardiaques redessinés, avec un score Readiness exclusif.Fnac449.00 €See at Fnac
Apple Watch Series 11 GPS 42 mmMontre connectée Apple, score de sommeil, suivi de la santé, écran toujours activé.AmazonSee at Amazon
Prices checked on October 1, 2026. Prices and availability may change.
Some links on this page are affiliate links: Wanda-techs may earn a commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. This does not influence our opinion.
Final verdict: Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11, which one should you choose?
Choose the Apple Watch Series 12 if you have never owned an Apple watch, if yours dates from 2023 or earlier, or if you train with a goal in mind. The closely tracked pulse, the fitness score and the express top-up are things you notice every day. The reinforced glass is something you will notice in four years.
Go for the Apple Watch Series 11 if you unearth it at €350 or less and your use boils down to notifications, contactless payment, sleep and walking. Same watch in front of your eyes, a hundred euros more in your pocket.
Is a Series 10 or 11 already on your wrist? Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11 is not your concern: stay put. TechRadar spent seven days with the Series 12 and reckons owners of the previous model would gain next to nothing. We sign that with both hands.
Our pick
Apple Watch Series 12 in aluminium, GPS, 42 mm — at €449 (roughly 295,000 FCFA), it measures exactly what the ceramic version measures at more than twice the price, and it does without an eSIM plan you cannot get in French-speaking Africa anyway. The Series 11 is a worthy substitute the moment it drops below €350.
Frequently asked questions
Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11: what are the real differences?
Nearly all of them hide under the case. The Series 12 gets the S11 chip, rebuilt sensors that check the pulse twelve times a minute, the Readiness fitness score and Ceramic Shield 2 glass on aluminium. Its charging gives back twelve hours of use in a quarter of an hour, four more than the Series 11. The case, the 2,000-nit panel and the advertised 24 hours of battery life are common to both watches.
I already own a Series 11: is the Series 12 worth the switch?
No, barring a special case. The two watches look alike feature for feature, last the same day and run watchOS 27. Switching is only worth discussing if you follow a training plan and the Readiness score would truly be of use to you. Even then, wait for a discount or a trade-in offer: the amount to add is heavy for a benefit confined to sport.
Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11: which one lasts longer?
Apple quotes 24 hours for both, 38 once Low Power Mode is switched on. Labs have measured the Series 11 at between 30 and more than 40 hours depending on use. For the Series 12, published reviews confirm a day and the following night. It pulls ahead at the charger, where a quarter of an hour returns twelve hours against eight, and in sport, with ten hours of GPS tracking instead of eight.
Will the Series 11 get the Readiness score through an update?
Nothing suggests so. Apple reserves Readiness for the Series 12 and the Ultra 4, citing their new heart sensors. watchOS 27 does install on the Series 11, but without this app or the live pulse curve. The 2025 watch does record nights, effort and temperature all the same. So do not buy the older model hoping a software update will let it catch up.
That wraps up this Apple Watch Series 12 vs Series 11 face-off between two near-twin watches. Which way does your wrist lean: the new one at full price or the old one on sale? Tell us what you chose in the comments.
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