When will Apple Watch Series 7 be available?

Apple didn’t give a release date for the new Apple Watch Series 7 lineup, just offering a “later this fall” tag — a sign that production issues have and continue to take a toll. Besides the 20% larger screen, which is reportedly the cause of the delay, not much else is new with the Series 7 over the Series 6.

Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:

The bigger display offers about 16% more pixels on the new 45-millimeter version and represents a screen-size increase from about 1.78 inches to just over 1.9 inches… Apple was able to keep the Series 7 case sizes mostly the same (moving from 40 and 44 millimeters to 41 and 45 millimeters) by shrinking the borders by about 40%.

The company also says the new cover glass is more crack-resistant (anyone else break their watch screen bumping into a door knob?), and that the display will be brighter in always-on mode.

While the S7 chip in the Apple Watch is new, the CPU itself appears to be the same as the one in last year’s Series 6 (similar to the S4-to-S5 jump in 2019). Other changes are also slim, with health sensors remaining the same and the only other enhancements I can find being faster charging and dust resistance.

The watch portion of the keynote was fairly brief, and the promise of a “later this fall” release was unusual. Typically the new watches ship quickly after the keynote. In this case, the company wasn’t even willing to say October or November. That’s because the new watch is facing some serious supply-chain problems…

MacDailyNews Note: At the end of August, Debby Wu and Gurman reported for Bloomberg News that Apple Watch Series 7 was suffering from production delays due to a new screen technology that brings that display closer to the cover glass by using a different lamination technique, which may be the main cause of the production woes.