Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 include a new Health Sensing System that dramatically improves heart rate data. The new system also includes a new Theater Mode setting that you may want to enable.
The new watches measure heart rate every five seconds, a big increase over the five-minute rate from prior models.
As a result, the green light behind the watch is pretty much always flashing now. It’s not something you’ll notice when you’re wearing your watch tight. However, you may see the green light if your band is a bit loose.
For that reason, the new Apple Watches drop back to the five-minute interval in two modes: Theater Mode and Sleep Mode.
Sleep Mode dropping down to five-minute intervals makes sense for a few reasons. First, it helps extend battery life while you’re not active. Second, sleeping means the watch doesn’t need to detect physical activity in the same way.
Theater Mode is different. Toggled on and off from Control Center, Theater Mode is meant to prevent the watch display from lighting up.
By default, it also drops heart rate sensing from live to every five minutes. This is presumably to prevent the green light from being noticeable in a dark environment.
However, if you don’t think the light is visible and want the most detailed heart rate data, you can change a new Theater Mode setting.
In Settings > Heart on the watch, you can toggle on “In Theater Mode” under “Allow Continuous Measurements” to restore the more frequent measurements.
For me, I’m not noticing the green light unless I intentionally peak under the watch, so I turned the toggle on for now.
If the option existed for Sleep Focus as well, I’d be happy to give it a shot and see how it affects battery life as well. The other option is to just not use the Sleep Focus, but then you give up wrist temperature collection and probably Readiness score compatibility.
Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 are both available now. You can read the 9to5Mac review here.
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