Rising Reports of Spurious Sensations on New Apple Watches - Fixes and Insights

First-generation Apple Watch Ultra.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET

Earlier this year, owners of the Apple Watch 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 started experiencing unintended touches and swipes on their displays. This “ghost touches” phenomenon causes the screen to jump around and behave erratically without any input from the user.

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The “ghost touch” issue has been causing significant inconvenience to Apple Watch 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 users, leading to everything from minor embarrassments to severe access problems. For some, it’s resulted in accidental calls or messages with typos. For others, the consequences have been more severe, such as being locked out of their devices completely because they couldn’t enter their passwords.

Watch OS 10.4 was meant to address this issue. Instead, the problem persists and, according to Stella Fudge , an Apple watcher and admin of the Apple Payroll Squad Discord server, the issue has now extended to the Apple Watch Series 7 , Series 8 , and the first-generation Apple Watch Ultra.

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In response, Apple has circulated a memo instructing Authorized Service Providers to delay any repairs or replacements. Apple is advising owners experiencing these issues to perform a hard reset by holding down the crown and side button simultaneously for 10 seconds until the Apple logo vanishes. Users are also encouraged to stay current with software updates as a further measure to potentially alleviate the problem.

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If you’re affected by this issue, try the hard reset procedure, and keep installing the updates – hopefully Apple will push out a fix for this problem soon.