Why the Apple Watch Series 10’s blood pressure feature may be delayed

The Apple Watch Series 10 was unveiled by Apple last week during the company’s “It’s Glowtime” launch event. While the new smartwatch and its predecessor support a new sleep apnea detection feature, another feature that was rumored to be in development — blood pressure monitoring — was not announced by the iPhone maker during the event. The feature has been supported on some smartwatch models previously launched by rivals, and is still expected to make its way into a future version of the Apple Watch.

In the latest edition of his weekly Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman writes: writes that Apple planned to introduce support for blood pressure monitoring with the Apple Watch Series 10. The journalist quotes a source who says that Apple’s design changes to the latest model led to some issues with the feature during testing “specifically with the updated design for the Series 10.”

As a result, the ability to monitor blood pressure levels will not be available on the Apple Watch Series 10, making the new sleep apnea detection feature the first major health feature introduced in recent years. It’s designed to alert users who may have a medical condition that causes breathing to pause and resume during sleep, which can lead to them waking up repeatedly.

Sleep apnea detection wasn’t the only health feature announced during Apple’s September 9 hardware launch event. While the company didn’t introduce a successor to the AirPods Pro (2nd generation) model, it did update the completely wireless stereo (TWS) headset with a new feature that allows wearers to use them as a medical-grade hearing aid.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last week approved the wireless headset for use as an over-the-counter hearing aid, making the second-generation AirPods the first product of its kind to receive approval from the U.S. regulator since it introduced new guidelines for such products in 2022.