Apple Watch may get cameras and Apple Intelligence by 2027

Holding your wrist up to let your watch see the world sounds like a retro spy movie trope. But inside Apple, that might just be the interface we are looking at in a couple of years.

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is actively working on camera-equipped Apple Watches with plans to release them around 2027, all in the service of bringing Apple Intelligence features like Visual Intelligence to your wrist.

Under the glass and on the side

Gurman reports that the integration will depend heavily on the model you wear. For the standard Series watch, Apple is aiming to tuck the camera under the display. On the rugged Apple Watch Ultra, the sensor would sit on the side, right next to the digital crown and button.

Either way, the primary goal is not wrist selfies. Apple wants the watch to see what you are looking at and use AI to serve up contextual details, mirroring the same approach it is reportedly exploring for future AirPods.

Visual Intelligence first arrived on the iPhone 16, letting people do things like add dates from an event flyer straight to the calendar or look up a storefront on the fly. While that setup relies in part on external AI partners today, Gurman says Apple hopes to run the 2027 wearables entirely on its own in-house models.

The hardware push is reportedly tied to Mike Rockwell, the Vision Pro chief who was recently assigned to fix Apple's delayed Siri LLM overhaul. Rockwell is still steering visionOS, which could also anchor the company's eventual Orion-style AR glasses, though those remain years down the road.

Why it matters

Putting cameras on wearables is a clear bid to free ambient AI from the smartphone pocket. If you are jogging or holding groceries, glancing at your wrist to scan an item or translate a sign is genuinely useful. But cramming image capture and on-device AI inference into a watch chassis will test battery limits, not to mention the social friction of wearing a visible lens in public spaces.

Across the industry, smartwatch upgrades have slowed down as health sensors hit incremental returns. Turning the watch into an AI sensor suite is Apple's attempt to define the next interaction wave. We think leveraging an existing wrist habit is smarter than trying to sell standalone AI pendants that people easily abandon. Still, by 2027, lightweight smart glasses from competitors could already dominate ambient vision, leaving wrist-based cameras feeling like an awkward middle ground.