I haven’t found anybody mentioning this anywhere. I found that since I upgraded everything to 26.1 (skipping 26.0) that it takes 5-10 seconds for parts of the display, such as exercise rings, to update, and even more troubling is I get the same 5-10 second delay using the watch to unlock my Mac and unlock apps like Quicken and 1Password. The unlocking delay has me considering putting my mechanical keyboard away for the Apple keyboard with the fingerprint sensor.
So am I alone with this nonsense? Watch is a series 9, and I don’t really want to replace it with a new one which might be faster, or might not.
I haven’t noticed sluggishness per se but I have noticed that my Weather app stops working after about 72 hours and needs a restart. And Live Activities have been on the fritz.
I think I may have fixed the problem. I turned off and then re-enabled the Apple watch for unlocking my Mac. I’ve also turned off Live Activities on my watch which seemed to make the watch features run faster. It’s still taking about 5 seconds to respond, so it still isn’t right. Maybe 26.2 on everything will fix it. I also tried resetting my watch, which had no effect.
Have you tried a hard reboot of your watch? I know others will think I’m crazy (I may be ), but I hard reboot all of my devices every Monday, including my Ultra 2. Everything runs smoothly and syncs instantly, or nearly so.
I just tried using my watch with my MacBookAir which is running the 26.2 beta. Works instantaneous, which tells me the issue may be with macOS 26. <2. I’m very tempted to install the beta on my iMac.
I upgraded macOS to 26.2 beta 3 and all the unlocking issues went away. That plus disabling Live Activities (not really convinced it was that useful anyway) have fixed my sluggishness issues.
), but I hard reboot all of my devices every Monday, including my Ultra 2. Everything runs smoothly and syncs instantly, or nearly so.