Apple Watch SE 3 Gets the Job Done for $199.99, Complete with an Always-On Display

When you put the Apple Watch SE 3, priced at $199.99 (was $249), on your wrist, the first thing you notice is how light it is—27 grams for the 40mm version, so light that you forget it’s there until your phone vibrates and the screen goes on without your touch. That always-on display, which was previously reserved for more expensive models, now glows at 1,000 nits, bright enough for a sunny sidewalk and dim enough for a midnight scroll through tomorrow’s weather.

Open the Workout app, select a run, and the S10 chip (same as the one in the $399 Series 11) fires up GPS in a second, tracks your pace with second-gen heart-rate optics and pipes music straight into the built-in speaker. No phone required. Finish the loop and the watch pings your iPhone to log the route. Later it’ll nudge you to stand, breathe with you for 60 seconds then give you a Sleep Score based on last night’s sleep—complete with a quiet heads up if you paused breathing too much.

Charge it for 15 minutes on the new fast charging puck and you get 8 hours of battery life, enough to put it back on before bed and wake up to a full graph of deep, light and sleep REM cycles. Temperature sensors monitors cycle shifts or detects fevers. Double tap your fingers to answer a call, flick your wrist to snooze an alarm, and ask Siri for the score—all on the device, with no cloud lag.

Yes, the bezels are thicker than the Series 11’s razor edges, and there is no ECG strip or blood-oxygen ring for those rare occasions when you require them. But for $199.99 you get 64GB of storage for podcasts and the flexibility to switch in practically every band Apple has ever made.