Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 owners might be wearing twice the storage Apple lets us use. A new claim says both watches ship with a 128GB flash chip inside, even though they're sold with 64GB, which would leave half of it locked away on two of the best Apple Watch models you can buy right now.
A Weibo teardown found 128GB inside the Apple Watch Series 12
The claim comes from a Chinese hardware researcher who goes by White rice fried white rice, and he shared his findings in a post on Weibo on Sunday (it's in Chinese, so I'm going off a translation). According to him, the flash chip in both watches is a 128GB part made by SK Hynix, while Apple only makes 64GB of it available to us.
A translation of the Weibo post claiming Apple's newest watches carry a 128GB storage chip. | Image by PhoneArena
This account doesn't have a long track record I can point to, so I'd treat the claim with some caution until proper teardowns show up. Still, it lines up with what we heard before launch, when these watches were rumored to be the first Apple Watch models with 128GB of storage.
The Apple Watch Ultra 4 officially offers 64GB of storage. | Image by Apple
Why a smartwatch would hide half of its storage
For those of us wearing one, this doesn't take anything away, since 64GB is exactly what Apple advertises.
The researcher's best guess is durability, and that makes a lot of sense once you know how flash storage wears out. Every time data gets written and erased, the storage cells take a little wear, so chipmakers keep spare space hidden from the user that the chip can rotate data into, swapping out worn blocks and spreading the writes evenly, as Samsung explains in its own white paper on the subject.
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A watch leans on that more than most gadgets, because it's logging health data and syncing it all day long. The researcher said his five-year-old Series 7, which only has 32GB of storage, has already racked up 5.84TB of writes, or roughly 3.3GB every single day.
What the hidden Apple Watch storage means for owners
If you already bought a Series 12 or Ultra 4, there's nothing to do here, since the extra space isn't something a setting or an update would hand over to us. The more interesting part is why Apple may need that much headroom this year.
The Apple Watch Series 12 showing its new Readiness scores. | Image by Apple
The researcher floated heavier health tracking as one reason, with the watch reading your heart rate far more often in the background, along with running more features directly on the watch. Both would mean a lot more data written every day, and a bigger spare area would help the chip hold up to it for longer.
I'm reading the Apple Watch's locked storage as a good sign
I'm assuming Apple won't ever confirm any of this, since it rarely talks about storage or RAM on its watches at all. Still, if the extra space really is there to keep the flash healthy, it could help the Series 12 and Ultra 4 stay on watchOS updates for longer, especially as Apple leans on heavier on-watch features.
I'd personally love to see a teardown confirm it soon, and hopefully Apple will someday be upfront about what's inside instead of leaving it to researchers on Weibo.
Johanna Romero is a Senior News Writer at PhoneArena, covering mobile technology news across Android, iOS, wearables, and the Google ecosystem she knows best. Drawing on 15 years in IT and tech support from 2007 to 2022, she brings a user-friendly eye for the practical features and lesser-known tricks readers care about. Google named her an official #TeamPixel member in 2022, and she also reviews the latest devices on her YouTube channel, JoJo the Techie.
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