The other half of Apple's event: AirPods 5, Watch Series 12, and a big health push

The iPhone Duo and iPhone 18 Pro took the headlines, but Apple spent a big chunk of the keynote on the things you'll actually buy more of — the wearables and audio. Here's the confirmed detail on AirPods 5, Apple Watch Series 12, and the health features underneath them, straight from Apple's own announcements.

AirPods 5 — ANC comes to the cheap ones

The notable thing about AirPods 5 isn't a new feature so much as where the feature landed: Active Noise Cancellation, long reserved for the pricier AirPods Pro, is now in Apple's entry-level open-ear buds.

Apple claims the open-ear ANC removes up to 50% more external noise than the previous AirPods 4 with ANC, via a new multiport acoustic architecture. The $149 model gets up to 5 hours of playback with ANC on (22 with the case). Both add Live Translation — real-time spoken translation through the buds — and hands-free Siri AI, the Apple-Intelligence Siri rolling out with iOS 27.

The read: this is Apple pushing a premium feature down-market to protect the AirPods line against cheap competition. ANC at $129 in an open-ear design is a genuinely aggressive value move, and the Live Translation feature — now across the whole AirPods lineup — is the kind of thing that sounds gimmicky until you travel with it.

Apple Watch Series 12 — rebuilt around health sensing

The Watch got a bigger rework than the numbers suggest.

The headline is accuracy: Apple says it's the most accurate heart-rate sensing in any wearable, now measuring every five seconds all day, with heart-rate variability captured up to 24 times more often. That feeds a new readiness score — a 0-10 daily read on whether your body is recovered, drawing on activity, training load, vitals and sleep. It's Apple directly answering the recovery-score feature that Oura and Whoop built their businesses on.

There's also a new class of Audio Intelligence features — Live Rewind (replays the last 15 seconds of a conversation as text), Siri Recap (summaries of conversations), and Sound Recognition for accessibility — all processed in an isolated secure compartment on the chip that Apple says deletes the audio immediately. That privacy framing is doing deliberate work, because a watch that listens to conversations is exactly the kind of thing that alarms people.

The health push is the real story

Step back from the individual products and the theme is unmistakable: Apple is leaning hard into health as the reason to own its wearables. The readiness score, the redesigned Health app with a "Longevity" tab and a Health Age metric, movement evaluations using on-device AI, even the ability to book lab tests with 50+ biomarkers through the Health app — this is Apple positioning the Watch and iPhone as a long-term health platform, not a notification screen.

It's also where Apple's AI story is most concrete. While the iPhone's Apple Intelligence has been criticised as thin, the health features are a place where on-device AI does something genuinely useful and hard to copy — analysing your own longitudinal data privately, on your wrist. If Apple has an answer to "you're behind on AI," this health system is a better one than Siri.

Apple Watch Ultra 4

Apple also announced the Apple Watch Ultra 4, the top-tier rugged model, alongside the Series 12. Apple released it the same day with the same health-sensing and Audio Intelligence features; detailed pricing and spec confirmation for the Ultra 4 is lighter in what's been published so far, so we'll cover it specifically once the full detail settles rather than state figures we can't yet confirm.

The dates

Everything here is confirmed from Apple's own newsroom. For the phones — iPhone 18 Pro and the iPhone Duo foldable — see the main event breakdown.