Apple has been redesigning its smartwatches on a three-year cycle, and since the Apple Watch Series 7 added a larger display to the lineup, the upcoming Apple Watch Series 10 (or Apple Watch X, depending on who the leaker is) is the third watch

We've seen many rumors claiming some radical redesign of Apple's smartwatch, but a new report from 9to5Mac uses recent posts by 91mobiles and Bloomberg to suggest that all the design overhaul claims are a bit exaggerated suggesting that they are

Claims that the Apple Watch Series 10 will expand from 41mm and 45mm to 45mm and 49mm have been seen before It was also said that the upcoming watch would be thinner; Bloomberg's Mark Garman reported last year that the Series 10 would get its biggest overhaul to date Garman's news about Apple is generally pretty accurate

Much of the talk of design changes we've seen suggests that the band and the way it connects to the watch face will undergo the biggest changes in this update The design changes suggest that Watch 10 will no longer be compatible with previous Apple Watch bands

Leaked CAD renderings of the Apple Watch Series 10 posted on 91mobiles last week show a 2-inch watch face, larger than the current Apple Watch Ultra 2, making it one of the largest smartwatches on the market It is possible that this could be the largest smartwatch on the market However, the design looked exactly like the Series 9, only larger

In addition, Garman claims in a recent column that the Apple Watch Ultra 3 will look almost identical to previous models: "This year's third-generation Apple Watch Ultra will look almost identical to the original, while the other watch models will look like the Series 4 launched in 2018 It still looks similar"

What happened to the radical redesign and "biggest overhaul ever"?

Garman attributes it to a combination of inflation pressuring consumers to hold on to their tech products longer and companies like Apple responding by making their devices less durable, even if that means fewer design changes Instead, they are focusing on new features that extend functionality if the hardware can support it (See Apple's Apple Intelligence initiative to be announced later this year)

This is the difficulty with rumors: they paint a fairly attractive picture of a product, but they can be spectacularly wrong Take the aforementioned Apple Watch 7, for example, which was said to be a "flat edge" device with a revolutionary design It never actually materialized

So Apple Watch 10 may not be such a big change after all At the very least, those who already have an Apple Watch may not need to buy a new band