Hypertension notifications and Sleep Score are rolling out with WatchOS 26, and older Apple Watches will get them too.
Turns out the biggest new Apple Watch health features don’t require new hardware. One of the standout moments at Apple’s September event was the announcement of two new health features on the Apple Watch: hypertension notifications and a new sleep score. Hypertension notifications will alert Apple Watch owners of potential signs of high blood pressure, a condition that often goes undiagnosed in millions of people. Sleep Score, meanwhile, grades the quality of your rest on a 0–100 scale.
Because these new features were unveiled on stage as part of the Apple Watch Series 11 and Apple Watch Ultra 3 announcement at the keynote, many (including myself) assumed they’d be exclusive to the newest high-end models. But upon closer review, Apple is staying true to its promise to roll out features as they’re ready and not just when new hardware drops.
Both these features will be coming not just with the new models, but also with the update to WatchOS 26 and could go as far back as the Series 6 and Apple Watch SE (2nd gen) in the case of Sleep Score.
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While it’s not the full blood pressure monitoring that many Apple Watch fans were hoping for, hypertension alerts use existing sensors to tackle a serious health concern: a potentially fatal, silent condition that many people don’t even realize they’re living with. According to Apple the feature is expected to notify over 1 million people with undiagnosed hypertension within the first year.
Much like Apple’s irregular heart rhythm and sleep apnea notifications, hypertension alerts work in the background and don’t require any extra steps. After a 30-day analysis period, the watch will send an alert if it detects patterns consistent with high blood pressure. Apple is clear that this is not a diagnosis. The feature is currently under review by the US Food and Drug Administration, with clearance expected later this year, but the goal is to provide an early warning that sparks a conversation with a physician.
If an alert does appear, the Apple Watch will recommend that you confirm the results with a traditional blood pressure cuff. All related data can be logged in the Health app on iPhone, and exported as a PDF for your doctor. That extra step cuts out the typical «wait and track» cycle often required after a doctor’s visit and instead lets you walk in with actionable data in hand.
The feature will be preloaded onto the new Series 11 and Ultra 3 and will be part of the WatchOS 26 update on Sept. 15 for the Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10 and Ultra 2. Decoding Sleep Score
The Apple Watch has tracked sleep for years, measuring duration, sleep stages and overall consistency. But it stopped short of giving you an actual score the way competitors like Samsung, Oura and Garmin do. That changes with Sleep Score.
Sleep Score takes your nightly data and assigns a rating from 0–100 (or from «low» to «excellent») based on three main criteria: duration, number of interruptions (e.g. kids and pets) and bedtime consistency — which Apple says is one of the biggest contributors to quality sleep.
The timing of this rollout is no accident. Apple has a track record of waiting until it has both the scientific backing and enough of its own data to justify launching a new health feature. Sleep Score uses new guidance from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, the National Sleep Foundation and the World Sleep Society. The algorithm itself was built and validated using over 5 million nights of sleep data from the ongoing Apple Heart and Movement Study.
Each morning, Apple Watch owners will see their score in the Sleep app on their iPhone, as a complication on their watch face, or directly within the Health app. A deeper breakdown reveals how each of the three factors influenced your score, along with explanations of what went wrong (or right). For example, going to bed later than usual could dock points in the bedtime category and pull your overall score down. While it’s not directly prescriptive, the added context helps take the mystery out of what those numbers mean.
Even better, Sleep Score works retroactively. If you’ve been logging sleep for a while, past data will be automatically updated with scores once you install the new software.
Sleep Score will be available on Apple Watch Series 6 and later, SE 2 and later, and all Ultra models when paired with an iPhone 11 or newer running iOS 26.

NASA has announced that its Perseverance Mars rover spotted «potential biosignatures» in an ancient dry riverbed last year.
NASA has announced that its Perseverance Mars rover spotted «potential biosignatures» in an ancient dry riverbed last year.
Samples collected from a rock dubbed «Cheyava Falls» contain a structure that hints at the possibility of having a biological origin, according to the space agency, but more research needs to be completed to draw any conclusions about the presence of life on the Red Planet.
«The identification of a potential biosignature on the Red Planet is a groundbreaking discovery, and one that will advance our understanding of Mars», said interim NASA administrator Sean Duffy in a statement, arguing this is the «closest we have ever come to discovering life on Mars.»
The rover first encountered the rock in July 2024 while exploring a rocky outcropping, called the Bright Angel rock formation, on the edge of an ancient river valley, which scientists believe was carved into the Martian surface by a rushing river billions of years ago.
Perseverance’s science instruments revealed layers of clay and silt, which are «excellent preservers of past microbial life» on Earth, according to NASA.
«The combination of chemical compounds we found in the Bright Angel formation could have been a rich source of energy for microbial metabolisms», said Stony Brook University associate professor Joel Hurowitz, coauthor of a new paper published in the journal Nature about the finding, in the statement.
Despite the exciting findings, Hurowitz warned that it’s still far too early to draw any conclusions about «discovering life on Mars», as Duffy put it, and scientists have yet to rule out abiotic, or non-living, explanations.
«But just because we saw all these compelling chemical signatures in the data didn’t mean we had a potential biosignature», Hurowitz explained. «We needed to analyze what that data could mean.»
Mysterious, colorful spots on the Cheyava Falls rock had scientists intrigued. The spots could’ve been left behind by microbes billions of years ago, after turning organic carbon, sulfur, and phosphorus in the rock into energy.
Some of these «leopard spots» contained greigite, or iron sulfide, which certain Earth-based microbes can produce. They also contained vivianite, or hydrated iron phosphate, which is found near decaying organic matter on Earth.
«These reactions appear to have taken place shortly after the mud was deposited on the lake bottom», Hurowitz told Reuters. «On Earth, reactions like these, which combine organic matter and chemical compounds in mud to form new minerals like vivianite and greigite, are often driven by the activity of microbes.»
In other words, scientists are hypothesizing that Martian microbial life could’ve left us an important clue of their existence eons ago.
Since the Cheyava Falls rock is younger compared to other closely examined Martian rocks, the finding could mean the planet was been habitable for much longer than previously believed.
«Astrobiological claims, particularly those related to the potential discovery of past extraterrestrial life, require extraordinary evidence», said Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Perseverance project scientist Katie Morgan in the NASA statement.
«Getting such a significant finding as a potential biosignature on Mars into a peer-reviewed publication is a crucial step in the scientific process because it ensures the rigor, validity, and significance of our results», she added. «And while abiotic explanations for what we see at Bright Angel are less likely given the paper’s findings, we cannot rule them out.»
For one, «there are chemical processes that can cause similar reactions in the absence of biology», Hurowitz told Reuters, meaning that we cannot rule them out «completely on the basis of rover data alone.»
However, future research could finally bring us closer to a more definitive answer as to whether microbial life could have once been feeding on ancient rocks on the Red Planet.

Apple’s latest smartphones still only claim to have batteries good for 1,000 charging cycles, while Samsung reports hitting 2,000.
EU energy labels offer a convenient way to see how many times you can charge your phone before losing capacity.
Samsung’s been a leader there, claiming 2,000 cycles for devices like its Galaxy S25 phones.
Apple only manages to hit 1,000 cycles, according to its iPhone 17 energy labels.
Shopping for a new smartphone can be seriously nerve-wracking, and while manufacturers throw plenty of specs at us, it can sometimes be really difficult to get objective numbers for making comparisons. That is a big reason why we’ve been so excited this year to see the debut of the EU’s new energy efficiency labels, providing important details about not just how power-efficient our phones are, but also how durable — and that includes the battery itself.
Beyond just reporting how long users can expect a fully charged battery to last, the labels give shoppers an indication as to how many charging cycles they might hope to get out of their phone over the course of its useful life. And as we already saw, Samsung phones are seriously leading the pack there, claiming battery performance that endures through 2,000 charging cycles. But how does that compare to the new iPhone 17 family?
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When we last checked, Apple was still on the iPhone 16 series, and those handsets — along with all its other hardware we could find — reported being good for 1,000 charge cycles. Now we finally have the updated EU energy labels for the iPhone 17 series, and we’ve got some bad news if you were hoping for a boost there.
All four iPhone 17 handsets offer the same sort of high power efficiency — including the super-thin new iPhone Air — but they’re not making any progress when it comes to long-term battery endurance, still indicating an expected 1,000 charge cycles.
These EU models aren’t exactly the same iPhones you’ll get for sale in the US, and while Apple does indicate that iPhone 17 variants with a physical SIM tray are getting a slightly smaller battery as a result, we’re not expecting any differences there when it comes to battery chemistry that would impact these numbers.
Perhaps Apple is being exceedingly conservative — or Samsung, the exact opposite — but that’s still got to be a disappointing number to stomach for iOS fans who were hoping to see Apple step up its game in this department. We doubt the lack of forward momentum here will actually dissuade a huge number of iPhone users from upgrading, but even a modest boost would have been a nice feather in the iPhone 17’s cap. At least Apple’s got a rich ecosystem of power accessories to fall back on!
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