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Four new watch faces travel from sunlit shallows to total darkness, while a titanium band built to fit over a wetsuit joins Hermès’ oldest equestrian shapes.
Apple and Hermès are back for another season together, and this one leans harder into a set theme than most. The Apple Watch Hermès fall collection splits across two cases. Series 12 comes in 42mm and 46mm sizes, finished in Radiant Gold Titanium or Silver Titanium, and sold only as a GPS plus cellular model, a narrower spread than the standard Series 12’s four aluminum colors, two titanium finishes, and return ceramic option. There is no aluminum or ceramic Hermès case this year, and no GPS only configure either.
Ultra 4 keeps the standard case’s 49mm titanium build and pairs it with its own separate band collection built around water and adventure rather than the office. Apple’s own product page frames the season around three worlds: deep-sea expeditions, sophisticated evenings, and equestrian fixtures. Each shows up as a specific band, a specific colorway, and in most cases a matching watch face.
Both watches share the same internal changes as their non-Hermès counterparts. A new S11 chip drives a redesign health sense sys that reads mid rate every five seconds and heart rate vary every five minutes, up to 24 times more often than the prior gen, fed a new Readiness score that sorts a wearer’s day into Recover, Pace Yourself, Ready, or Go For It. Ultra 4 also picks up the bigger battery gain of the two, up to 50 hours of normal use and 84 hours in Low Power Mode, extending to 45 hours in a new Max Extended Workout mode. The S11 chip add enable a set of on-device Audio Intel feat, Sound Recognition for alerts like doorbells or a crying baby, a Live Rewind transcript of the last 15 seconds of speech, and a Siri Recap convo summary, though Apple has said some of those arrive as beta later in the year rather than at launch. None of that is specific to the Hermès edition, but it’s the hardware every Hermès buyer is paying a premium on top of.
An Apple Watch Hermès with a silver case and a braided maroon, red, and blue fabric band, display a horse-themed watch face with the Hermès Paris logo.
Last year’s Series 11 collection ran its own set of house codes across a different band lineup entirely: a Toile H Double Jeu reinterpretation of the checked canvas, a Double Tour Attelage buckle band, and a brushed stainless steel Grand H, joined partway through the season by Medor Rock and Neo Tricot. This fall replaces nearly all of it with the Rocabar Club, Kilim Single Tour, Satin Clou de Selle, and Grand H Titane, continue a pattern where Hermès turns over most of its Apple Watch band selection every season rather than carrying pieces forward.
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The clearest new idea in the collection sits on the Ultra 4 side. The Grand H Titane band is lightweight, corrosion resistant titanium in a color Apple calls Gris Titane, and it carry two removable link plus a built in extension mech that lengthen the band by up to 10 mm, enough to fit over a wetsuit. Apple prices it at $2,199, the most expensive single band anywhere in the current Hermès lineup.
The hardware underneath already leans that way. Ultra 4 carries a 100 meter water resistance rate and can be used for recreation scuba diving to 40 meters with a compatible third-party app, while Series 12 is rated to 50 meters and snorkel depths of 6 meters but isn’t meant for scuba dive at all. That gap is likely why the deep-sea theme concentrates almost entirely on the Ultra 4 side of the collection rather than spreading evenly across both cases.
Four new watch faces arrive alongside it, moving from the sunlit surface toward total darkness. One, called Fathom and Wonder, pairs the Ultra 4’s Depth complication with an illustrated diver descend through gradient blue water, and another tucks a pair of seahorses next to the brand’s signature orange box on an show seafloor. A sportier band, Scub’H Diving, takes a different approach entirely: molded rubber with circular, porthole style cutouts and a titanium clasp, sold in Bleu De Malte, Vert Vertigo, Gris Titane, and Noir for $549. Both bands pair with a Circulaire analog face carrying weather, activity ring, noise, and Paris time complications. A third Ultra 4 band, En Mer, is a textured knit that echoes ocean wave patterns with a subtle “H” motif woven through it, offered this fall in Argile and Bordeaux alongside four returning colors, and pairs with a Maritime digital face.
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Hermès’ equestrian references land on the Series 12 side. The Rocabar Club band is knit rather than leather or rubber, and its raised striping draws directly from 19th century horse blanket patterns and show jumping poles, with an elongated “H” running the length of the band. It comes in four colorways built around a dark Bleu Nuit base and sells for $499, paired with a Radial analog face carrying date and activity ring complications.
Sitting alongside it are the Grand H and Grand H Fin bands, both in a satiné finish with brushed metal links that close with a butterfly clasp. Grand H Fin, a slimmer reworking of the older Grand H shape, comes only in 42mm, while Grand H itself spans both sizes. Apple pairs both with a Classic analog face carrying lunar phase and date complications, a more restrained design than the illustrated ocean scenes on the Ultra 4 side. Neither band’s individual price turned up in Apple’s own product materials or in the retail coverage that priced the rest of the lineup, a gap worth flagging rather than guessing at. The Kilim Single Tour, a waterproof rubber band with a geometric interlocking “H” pattern and a quick release deployment buckle, rounds out the range in six colors, from Cuivre and Bleu De Malte to Bleu Pastel, also at $499.
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The collection’s third theme, what Apple’s own copy calls “sophisticated evenings,” centers on a single pairing: the radiant gold titanium Series 12 case with the Satin Clou de Selle band. The band is black satin webbing with gold hardware designed to match the case rather than contrast with it, the Clou de Selle stud, a saddle hardware detail Hermès has used across its own watches for years, picked out along its length. It comes in a single color, Noir, for $499, and pairs with its own Clou de Selle analog face carrying lunar phase and date complications. Apple describes the combination as one that moves “from day to night with effortless presence.”
The Toile H Single Tour rounds out the Series 12 range, woven from the checked canvas pattern Hermès has used in gold and ecru tones for close to a century, sold in Gold/Ecru or Noir/Ecru for $499.
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Every individual Hermès band now carries a published price, from $499 for the Kilim Single Tour, Rocabar Club, Satin Clou de Selle, and Toile H Single Tour bands, up to $549 for the En Mer and Scub’H Diving bands and $2,199 for the Grand H Titane. What Apple has not published, as of this week, is a price for the watches themselves. The Hermès Series 12 storefront lists twelve total configure across its sizes, cases, and bands, and the Hermès Ultra 4 page list its own full band set, each with a name and a photo but an empty price field. That’s a contrast with the standard lineup, where Apple confirmed $399 for the base Series 12 and $799 for the base Ultra 4 the same day it announce both watches.
It isn’t an unusual gap for launch week specifically. Apple’s Hermès case and band bundles have historically priced above the sum of a standard case and an a la carte band, and the same pattern is likely to hold once the figures populate ahead of the September 18 release. Until then, the individual band prices above are the only firm numbers Apple has attached to the word “Hermès” this season. AppleCare+ pricing for both Hermès models is similar blank on Apple’s support pages as of this week.
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Apple and Hermès have built this collide since September 2015, when the two companies introduced the first Apple Watch Hermès as Apple’s first partnership with a fashion house. At the time, Jonathan Ive, then Apple’s chief design officer, and Pierre-Alexis Dumas, Hermès’ executive vice president in charge of artistic direction, framed it as a pairing of two very different companies united by an uncompromising approach to design. Dumas described the partnership at the time as an alliance “like horse and carriage, a perfect team,” a line that has followed the collaboration through nine watch generations since.
That first collection sold for between $1,100 and $1,500 and offered three band shapes in stainless steel: Single Tour, Double Tour, and Cuff. A year later, Hermès added the Double Buckle Cuff, a design inspired by an archetypal Hermès sandal by Pierre Hardy, the house’s creative director for shoes and jewelry, expanding the line’s materials into Swift and Epsom calfskin leathers. Introducing that 2016 expansion, Dumas called it “a new step of our attelage,” the French term for a harnessed team of horses and the same idea behind his original 2015 line about horse and carriage. Titanium cases arrived on the Hermès side in later generations, and this fall’s Grand H Titane, at $2,199, is now the single most expensive band the collaboration has ever sold.
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Both Hermès watches are marked available starting September 18, alongside the standard Series 12 and Ultra 4, iPhone 18 Pro, and AirPods 5, all announced at Apple’s September 9 event. It was the first watch launch under John Ternus, who took over as Apple’s chief executive on September 1, with Tim Cook moving into the newly created role of executive chairman, though the event itself stayed focused on health sensors and Hermès bands rather than any change at the top. Both watches require an iPhone 11 or later running iOS 27, the same base as the standard Series 12 and Ultra 4. Pre-orders for both Hermès models are open now on Apple’s own site.
