Winners and losers: MacBooks level up with M2 while the Apple Watch 3 gets sunsetted

OPINION: This week has been a busy one in the world of tech with Apple’s WWDC 2022 conference seeing a wave of announcements and rival PC heavyweight Dell unveiling a super swish new XPS 13 2-in-1 to take on the iPad Pro.

But in the sea of news, for us here at Trusted Reviews there has been one very clear winner and one very clear loser. Here’s what we picked.

Winner: MacBook fans

Apple’s MacBooks have been going from strength-to-strength since the company started to load them with its own-brand M-series CPUs.

As we’ve noted in pretty much every MacBook review over the past two years, the M-series chips are brilliant. We’ve seen this since we tested the first generation M1, which originally debuted in the MacBook Air 2020 and offered brilliant performance that smoked what Intel offered on its predecessor.

Fast forward a couple of years and history repeated with the MacBook Pro 2021, which comes with more powerful M1 Max and M1 Pro chip options. Both once again offer next level performance and blitzed through demanding processes, like 4K video editing, when we reviewed the MacBook Pro 2021.

Which is why we were super stoked to see Apple unveil a new M2 chip, that’ll debut on the new MacBook Air 2022. Hands in the air, we haven’t actually tested the new chip yet, but based on Apple’s claims it looks very cool.

General improvements to the new M2 chip’s architecture mean that, according to Apple, the MacBook Air will offer an 8% CPU performance boost and 35% graphics performance boost on its predecessor. Considering how good the MacBook Air 2020 is to this day, if it delivers anything close to those numbers then Apple laptop fans will be in for an absolute treat.

Loser: Apple Watch 3 owners

While MacBook fans had a lot to get excited about at WWDC 2022, Apple went the opposite way with its Watch OS announcements. Specifically the firm delivered an outright gut punch to Apple Watch 3 owners by revealing that the wearable will not be upgraded to watchOS 9.

For those who missed it, watchOS 9 is the latest version of Apple’s wearable operating system. Debuted at WWDC 2022 the new version aims to fix a number of grumbles that many users had with the previous version. These include visible sleep stages as part of the Apple Watch’s sleep tracking system, and heart rate zones to give users a better idea of their performance during workouts.

Putting aside how much these features will improve watchOS, which has lagged behind rivals like Garmin on fitness and health tracking, for us at Trusted the big annoyance is that Apple is still selling the Watch 3 on its official store. People who’ve owned the Watch 3 since it first came out 2018 probably won’t mind too much. But this is a real kick in the teeth to anyone who’s purchased one within the last 12 months, with it effectively sounding the death knell for the wearable.