Apple Watch woes: blood-pressure feature stumbles; next-gen plastic SE faces design, cost hurdles

Apple’s current Apple Watch SE (second generation)
Apple keeps hitting snags while testing its long-awaited Apple Watch blood-pressure monitoring feature. And the redesigned next-gen plastic Apple Watch SE is also facing significant issues.
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
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[T]he company continues to run into problems while testing its long-planned blood-pressure tracking feature, I’m told. And the redesigned, plastic Apple Watch SE I’ve written about is also in serious jeopardy. The design team doesn’t like the look, and the operations team is finding it difficult to make the casing materially cheaper than the current aluminum chassis.
As for other Apple Watch features in development, I wrote a few months ago that the next Ultra model will get support for satellite texting, as well as the flavor of 5G wireless service known as RedCap. As part of the changes, it’s due to get a new modem chip from MediaTek Inc.

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MacDailyNews Take: 5G RedCap, short for 5G Reduced Capability (doesn’t “RedCap” sound so much better?), is a version of 5G technology designed to support less complex, lower-cost devices that don’t require the full speed and capacity of standard 5G networks.
Introduced by the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) in Release 17, RedCap scales down features like bandwidth, power consumption, and the number of antennas compared to typical 5G, making it ideal for applications like wearables, industrial sensors, and IoT devices. It still leverages 5G’s core benefits — such as low latency and high reliability — but operates at reduced peak data rates (think hundreds of Mbps instead of gigabits), which suits devices that prioritize battery life and affordability over raw performance.
In a nutshell, RedCap bridges the gap between high-end 5G and older technologies like 4G LTE Cat-1, offering a cost-effective, energy-efficient option for the growing ecosystem of connected gadgets.

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