Apple execs say the Apple Watch Series 7 was a 'unique' challenge

Apple Watch Series 7 Keyboard
Apple Watch Series 7 Keyboard (Image credit: Rene Ritchie / iMore)

What you need to know

  • Apple executives Stan Ng and Alan Dye sat down for a new interview with The Independent.
  • The two talked about the technical challenges the team faced when designing the Apple Watch Series 7.

There were a lot of things that could have gone wrong with the Apple Watch Series 7.

In a new interview with The Independent (via MacRumors), Stan Ng, Apple's Vice President of Product Marketing, and Alan Dye, Apple's Vice President of Interface Design, talked about the design challenges with trying to make the Apple Watch Series 7 a reality.

According to Ng, increasing the size of the display without increasing the size of the watch required the team to "completely re-engineering the display, the front crystal, the internals and the internal enclosure."

"The re-engineered display on Series 7 is a major technical innovation. Growing the display is such a huge benefit to users, but only if it doesn't compromise any other part of the experience, such as comfort or aesthetics or battery life or band compatibility."

Alan Dye said that the increased display size allowed the team to update watchOS to "make the user experience more clear and more accessible."

"We knew this was an opportunity to optimize the design of the entire experience. So, we went about over the past couple of years reconsidering and recrafting every element, making hundreds of really small but we think important and impactful changes to make the UI to work in harmony with the new display design and making the UI even easier to use."

The Apple Watch Series 7, which Apple launched in October, features a larger display, tougher glass, and faster charging. You can read the entire interview with Ng and Dye at The Independent.

Joe Wituschek
Contributor

Joe Wituschek is a Contributor at iMore. With over ten years in the technology industry, one of them being at Apple, Joe now covers the company for the website. In addition to covering breaking news, Joe also writes editorials and reviews for a range of products. He fell in love with Apple products when he got an iPod nano for Christmas almost twenty years ago. Despite being considered a "heavy" user, he has always preferred the consumer-focused products like the MacBook Air, iPad mini, and iPhone 13 mini. He will fight to the death to keep a mini iPhone in the lineup. In his free time, Joe enjoys video games, movies, photography, running, and basically everything outdoors.

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