I've been covering Apple Watch deals for years – This is the one model most people should buy on Black Friday

Don't sleep on the Apple Watch SE

Features By Stephen Warwick published 9 November 2024

When it comes to the best Black Friday deals out there, the Apple Watch can be one of the best value plays of the entire month. If you own an iPhone and want to vastly expand the experience, getting an Apple Watch is the next logical step. Entering its tenth year on the market, the Apple Watch adds so much value to the iPhone for its users. You get at-a-glance notifications, media playback controls, turn-by-turn navigation, Apple Wallet card payments, and more.

In more recent years, Apple has pivoted the focus of the Apple Watch to health, arguably the wearable’s biggest draw in 2024. Now your Apple Watch comes with heart rate monitoring, fall detection, Emergency SOS, ECG, and even tools to track dangerous diseases like atrial fibrillation.

If you’re in the market for your very first Apple Watch, then I’m here to tell you that there’s really only one model you’ll want to consider. But first, a few caveats. If you’re already an Apple Watch user, or an early adopter of the latest and greatest models, or you know you love the most expensive tech out there, this recommendation isn’t for you. That’s because I'm about to recommend the Apple Watch SE as the strongest Black Friday pick out there for first-timers.

I’ve been covering Apple and tech for eight years, before that, I used to work for the company, I was even boots-on-the-ground in the store on day one of the Apple Watch launch. In my opinion, the Apple Watch SE is not only the best Black Friday Apple Watch deal, but also the best deal in fitness tracking, period. You get a huge chunk of the Apple Watch experience at a fraction of the price, especially if you can score one over Black Friday. This year, that’s truer than ever. Here’s why the Apple Watch SE won’t let you down.

Apple Watch SE: The ultimate taster

The Apple Watch SE boasts a lot of the things that make the Apple Watch experience great, without some of the more costly premium features. Starting with health, you’ll get heart rate and irregular rhythm notifications, atrial fibrillation tracking, low cardio fitness notifications, and fall detection. You’re only missing out on two key features, the ECG app, and blood oxygen. However, if you’ve been paying attention, you might be aware that blood oxygen is no longer featured in any of the best Apple Watch models in the U.S. because of a patent dispute, so that’s one less reason not to choose the SE.

The Apple Watch SE is slightly smaller than the other flagship models, the Series 10 and the Ultra 2, but that 40mm (or 44mm) case size might lend itself more readily to kids or those with slender wrists. It’s got a vibrant OLED Retina display with 1,000 nits of brightness, as well as sleep tracking, the new Vitals app from watchOS 11, and cycle tracking.

It’s also water-resistant and swim-proof in up to 50m of water, and includes vital safety features such as Emergency SOS, emergency calling, and Fall and Crash Detection. The S8 chip lags a little behind the S9 and S10, but most users won’t notice any difference at all, except maybe when it comes to futureproofing.

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