watchOS 9 RC is Out! - What's New

**Apple Releases watchOS 9 RC: A Comprehensive Overview**

Apple has recently released watchOS 9 RC (Release Candidate), marking the final version before its public launch. This update is available early for developers and public beta testers, and it is expected to be the final version unless any last-minute changes or bug fixes are needed. The update size was approximately 400 megabytes when installed, though the official release to the public may be slightly larger.

**Release Date and Related Updates**

The official release date for watchOS 9 is September 12, 2022, coinciding with iOS 16 and tvOS 16. Other updates like homePod OS 16 and iPadOS 16/16.1 are scheduled for October, alongside macOS Ventura.

**Notable Features in watchOS 9 RC**

One of the standout features in watchOS 9 is the all-new compass application. This redesigned tool offers real-time tracking with a "Backtrack" feature that creates waypoints during activities like hiking or cycling to help users navigate back if lost. Additionally, the compass provides detailed information including latitude, longitude, and elevation, though some advanced features may vary by device.

**Expanded Watch Face Options**

watchOS 9 introduces new watch faces, including the popular Nike+ series (Nike Analog, Nike Bounce, etc.) now available to all users, not just those with Nike+ watches. Hermes watch owners also enjoy a new horse-themed face.

**Enhanced Low Power Mode**

A significant improvement is the new low power mode. This feature turns off the always-on display and limits sensor usage, cellular, and Wi-Fi connections. It alerts users that notifications may be delayed and critical functions like heart rate monitoring are suspended. The battery icon changes to yellow when active, and charging displays a different color or animation.

**Stopwatch Enhancements**

The stopwatch app has been updated to allow lap recording. Tapping the "lap" button during use captures timing data, aiding athletes in tracking their performance.

**FIDO Security Integration**

watchOS 9 includes code referencing FIDO security keys, suggesting potential integration with Bluetooth devices like YubiKeys for enhanced authentication processes.

**Bug Fixes and Known Issues**

While watchOS 9 is generally stable, some known issues remain. These include pairing problems between different beta versions and voice shortcuts misbehaving when using Siri. Additionally, American Express cards in the Wallet app may need re-adding after updating to beta 6 or later.

**Battery Health and Performance**

Battery life remains consistent with previous betas, performing well even during extended use. The recalibrated battery capacity for Series 4 and 5 watches ensures more accurate health tracking.

**Conclusion**

watchOS 9 RC introduces significant improvements and features, making it a worthwhile update for users. Early adopters have noted minimal issues, and the overall performance remains stable. Stay tuned for hands-on reviews of the new Apple Watch models—Ultra, Series 8, and SE—as they become available.

For any questions or insights regarding watchOS 9 RC, feel free to comment below. Don’t forget to subscribe for more updates and like if you found this informative! Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you next time.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi everyone aaron here for zollotech and yesterday apple released watchos 9rc or release candidate it's the final version that releases to the public but you get it early as a developer or public beta tester as long as there's no additional changes or things they need to fix with bugs this will be the final version now it said paused here so we didn't get to see the actual size but this was about 400 megabytes or so when i installed this not a huge update but the overall update should be a little bit bigger when it comes out to the public if you're on watchos 8 of any version of those now this released alongside ios 16rc and apple has announced that the official release date is in a few days it releases on september 12 2022 along with ios 16 and watch os 9 and then tv os 16 and home pod os 16. ipad os 16 or 16.1 will be out in october along with mac os ventura now this particular update does have some changes compared to the previous update so there's a few things to look at but first let's go into our settings then we'll go to general then about and we'll take a look at the build number and talk about what's new so you can see the version says 20r361 and that just lets you know what the current build is and that should be the final build released to the public now the first thing that we can see that's new is an all new compass apple announced three new watches yesterday the apple watch ultra apple watch 8 and apple watch se and with that introduce this all new compass it's completely redesigned so let's zoom in here and take a closer look now as i move it of course it's changing in real time and we also have a feature depending on which watch you have this is called backtrack you can start backtrack and it says apple watch can record your route in case you get lost so it will actually sort of make waypoints as you walk whether you're hiking or maybe you're riding a bike or something else it will make waypoints so that you can figure out where you're at to go back and you also have a waypoint marker here in the lower left that identifies where you're at so if we go into that we'll actually give you detailed information and i won't scroll down as it will give my direct location with everything from latitude and longitude to tell you exactly where you are but it lets you know where you're at there's also an overall different style compass as well and as you can see here it's giving more information as far as incline and elevation and also latitude and longitude of course i won't scroll down for the same reason gives the precise location but this is great they've updated this on the different apple watches some of the features though are not available to all apple watches so it's nice that they've added this though now another thing that they've added that's really nice is maybe you have an apple watch and you've always liked those nike watch faces now on our phone if we go over to the watch app and we go to face gallery if you've always wanted those apple nike plus watch faces but never had a nike plus watch they've actually added it for everyone now in the face gallery so we can use the nike plus watch faces and as we scroll down you'll see nike analog nike bounce nike compact nike digital nike hybrid and if you have an apple watch hermes watch you also get a new horse face watch face so it's sort of a silhouette of a horse on the side and that's something that's new for hermes watches so all of those things are new that's added in rc it'll of course be there with the final release now also they've added a new low power mode so if we go back to the watch within the watch if we go to our control center tap on the battery you'll see we have low power mode it used to be sort of a power reserve mode now we can turn it on and it actually warns us as to what it does it says save battery life by turning off always on display and limiting the sensors as well as the cellular and wi-fi connections of your apple watch notifications may be delayed and emergency alerts may not arrive and this will turn off features such as background heart rate measurement heart rate notifications irregular rhythm notifications blood oxygen measurements so you can turn that on or turn it on for a set amount of time so we'll turn it on for now you'll see it changes the battery icon to yellow puts a little yellow icon at the top to let you know you're in low power mode and also if you put it on the charger it has a little different animation or not different animation but different color for the charging so let me put in my passcode we'll try it again now let's put it on the charger and you'll see that we have a new yellow icon and they've changed the little lightning bolt a little bit and when you're in low power mode it will be yellow so that's just a slight change something they've updated and also if you tap on the battery icon there or the battery percentage it will say charging to full you'll have an option if you're at 80 maybe for optimized battery charging where you can actually press to charge to full so that's something they've added in this update and if we go back and turn off low power mode so we'll turn that off everything switches back to green and then again if we put it back on the charger the same thing will happen so we'll give it a second sometimes it doesn't react right away but we'll try again here you'll see it switches and now we have the green icon back but if we tap on the power icon again charging to full so it's a nice little change there if we go into stopwatch there's a change so if we go into stopwatch hit start on our digital watch we can now record laps so if we tap lap then when someone comes back around we can hit lap again or if we're running ourselves and then hit stop so we can record our lap just by tapping that over and over also within the code of watchu s9 there's mentions of fido security so maybe we could use this as a security key via bluetooth like we can with some of the bluetooth fido security keys or yubi keys so that's possible whether or not that's for series 7 apple watch is hard to say but either way it was in the code now as far as the bug fixes and things they've updated well if we go to our notes in the feedback app you can see here there's some notes and known issues so the release notes give some information about still some known issues that exist but not a ton of things so you'll see devices running beta 4 later aren't backward compatible with devices running earlier beta versions so that's just a few things as far as maybe pairing your apple watch and then as we go down you'll see there's some new features that they mentioned some for developers and also voice shortcuts has a known issue it says when saying an app shortcut phrase to siri siri launches the app or ends up with an unexpected result and then again there's still that wallet issue with american express cards that might need to be removed and re-added to wallet after updating to watch os 9 beta 6 or later so still a few things in here but most of the time they fix these pretty quickly and these are not any major issues so they've fixed most of these issues overall and they've also said that they're going to recalibrate and estimate better battery capacity on the series 4 and series 5 watches they've done this in the past with different watches and overall batteries shouldn't be different anyway of course there's some bug fixes as well but watchos 9 has actually been pretty stable as i've been using it performance has been nice and fast and i've really had no issues whatsoever except for maybe the earliest betas typically those have some bugs but so far this seems to be nice and fast whether you're going into a workout here loading different apps and everything else it's nice and fast that way a battery life seems to be pretty good as well i took this off the charger this morning and you'll see we're at 93 percent so it's been on the entire time recording this video and that low power mode should really help if you need to get through the rest of your day and you don't have time to charge otherwise i wouldn't use it regularly but battery life overall i would expect it to be about the same it's been pretty good on all of the betas and gotten me through the day and just for those of you that are curious that ask me we'll go into settings we'll go down to battery give it just a moment here to get down here and then battery health this is at 98 after a year so pretty good overall i charge it every night seems to be lasting just fine of course yesterday apple announced that new apple watch ultra the apple watch series a and apple watch se like i mentioned before and of course as soon as i get my hands on them i'll have videos about all the different watches now if there's anything that you want to know about the watch maybe you weren't able to find from apple yesterday or you just haven't been able to find an answer to let me know in the comments below and i'll try and answer that of course if you found anything else in apple watch 9 rc of course let me know in the comments below and if you haven't subscribed already please subscribe and if you enjoyed the video please give it a like as always thanks for watching this is aaron i'll see you next time so youhi everyone aaron here for zollotech and yesterday apple released watchos 9rc or release candidate it's the final version that releases to the public but you get it early as a developer or public beta tester as long as there's no additional changes or things they need to fix with bugs this will be the final version now it said paused here so we didn't get to see the actual size but this was about 400 megabytes or so when i installed this not a huge update but the overall update should be a little bit bigger when it comes out to the public if you're on watchos 8 of any version of those now this released alongside ios 16rc and apple has announced that the official release date is in a few days it releases on september 12 2022 along with ios 16 and watch os 9 and then tv os 16 and home pod os 16. ipad os 16 or 16.1 will be out in october along with mac os ventura now this particular update does have some changes compared to the previous update so there's a few things to look at but first let's go into our settings then we'll go to general then about and we'll take a look at the build number and talk about what's new so you can see the version says 20r361 and that just lets you know what the current build is and that should be the final build released to the public now the first thing that we can see that's new is an all new compass apple announced three new watches yesterday the apple watch ultra apple watch 8 and apple watch se and with that introduce this all new compass it's completely redesigned so let's zoom in here and take a closer look now as i move it of course it's changing in real time and we also have a feature depending on which watch you have this is called backtrack you can start backtrack and it says apple watch can record your route in case you get lost so it will actually sort of make waypoints as you walk whether you're hiking or maybe you're riding a bike or something else it will make waypoints so that you can figure out where you're at to go back and you also have a waypoint marker here in the lower left that identifies where you're at so if we go into that we'll actually give you detailed information and i won't scroll down as it will give my direct location with everything from latitude and longitude to tell you exactly where you are but it lets you know where you're at there's also an overall different style compass as well and as you can see here it's giving more information as far as incline and elevation and also latitude and longitude of course i won't scroll down for the same reason gives the precise location but this is great they've updated this on the different apple watches some of the features though are not available to all apple watches so it's nice that they've added this though now another thing that they've added that's really nice is maybe you have an apple watch and you've always liked those nike watch faces now on our phone if we go over to the watch app and we go to face gallery if you've always wanted those apple nike plus watch faces but never had a nike plus watch they've actually added it for everyone now in the face gallery so we can use the nike plus watch faces and as we scroll down you'll see nike analog nike bounce nike compact nike digital nike hybrid and if you have an apple watch hermes watch you also get a new horse face watch face so it's sort of a silhouette of a horse on the side and that's something that's new for hermes watches so all of those things are new that's added in rc it'll of course be there with the final release now also they've added a new low power mode so if we go back to the watch within the watch if we go to our control center tap on the battery you'll see we have low power mode it used to be sort of a power reserve mode now we can turn it on and it actually warns us as to what it does it says save battery life by turning off always on display and limiting the sensors as well as the cellular and wi-fi connections of your apple watch notifications may be delayed and emergency alerts may not arrive and this will turn off features such as background heart rate measurement heart rate notifications irregular rhythm notifications blood oxygen measurements so you can turn that on or turn it on for a set amount of time so we'll turn it on for now you'll see it changes the battery icon to yellow puts a little yellow icon at the top to let you know you're in low power mode and also if you put it on the charger it has a little different animation or not different animation but different color for the charging so let me put in my passcode we'll try it again now let's put it on the charger and you'll see that we have a new yellow icon and they've changed the little lightning bolt a little bit and when you're in low power mode it will be yellow so that's just a slight change something they've updated and also if you tap on the battery icon there or the battery percentage it will say charging to full you'll have an option if you're at 80 maybe for optimized battery charging where you can actually press to charge to full so that's something they've added in this update and if we go back and turn off low power mode so we'll turn that off everything switches back to green and then again if we put it back on the charger the same thing will happen so we'll give it a second sometimes it doesn't react right away but we'll try again here you'll see it switches and now we have the green icon back but if we tap on the power icon again charging to full so it's a nice little change there if we go into stopwatch there's a change so if we go into stopwatch hit start on our digital watch we can now record laps so if we tap lap then when someone comes back around we can hit lap again or if we're running ourselves and then hit stop so we can record our lap just by tapping that over and over also within the code of watchu s9 there's mentions of fido security so maybe we could use this as a security key via bluetooth like we can with some of the bluetooth fido security keys or yubi keys so that's possible whether or not that's for series 7 apple watch is hard to say but either way it was in the code now as far as the bug fixes and things they've updated well if we go to our notes in the feedback app you can see here there's some notes and known issues so the release notes give some information about still some known issues that exist but not a ton of things so you'll see devices running beta 4 later aren't backward compatible with devices running earlier beta versions so that's just a few things as far as maybe pairing your apple watch and then as we go down you'll see there's some new features that they mentioned some for developers and also voice shortcuts has a known issue it says when saying an app shortcut phrase to siri siri launches the app or ends up with an unexpected result and then again there's still that wallet issue with american express cards that might need to be removed and re-added to wallet after updating to watch os 9 beta 6 or later so still a few things in here but most of the time they fix these pretty quickly and these are not any major issues so they've fixed most of these issues overall and they've also said that they're going to recalibrate and estimate better battery capacity on the series 4 and series 5 watches they've done this in the past with different watches and overall batteries shouldn't be different anyway of course there's some bug fixes as well but watchos 9 has actually been pretty stable as i've been using it performance has been nice and fast and i've really had no issues whatsoever except for maybe the earliest betas typically those have some bugs but so far this seems to be nice and fast whether you're going into a workout here loading different apps and everything else it's nice and fast that way a battery life seems to be pretty good as well i took this off the charger this morning and you'll see we're at 93 percent so it's been on the entire time recording this video and that low power mode should really help if you need to get through the rest of your day and you don't have time to charge otherwise i wouldn't use it regularly but battery life overall i would expect it to be about the same it's been pretty good on all of the betas and gotten me through the day and just for those of you that are curious that ask me we'll go into settings we'll go down to battery give it just a moment here to get down here and then battery health this is at 98 after a year so pretty good overall i charge it every night seems to be lasting just fine of course yesterday apple announced that new apple watch ultra the apple watch series a and apple watch se like i mentioned before and of course as soon as i get my hands on them i'll have videos about all the different watches now if there's anything that you want to know about the watch maybe you weren't able to find from apple yesterday or you just haven't been able to find an answer to let me know in the comments below and i'll try and answer that of course if you found anything else in apple watch 9 rc of course let me know in the comments below and if you haven't subscribed already please subscribe and if you enjoyed the video please give it a like as always thanks for watching this is aaron i'll see you next time so you\n"