Apple Went All In To Give Snoopy Life In New Watch Face

Foreground images via Apple [1][2], background generated on AI

Snoopy has relocated from his iconic red kennel to your Apple Watch with the release of watchOS 10, which includes an exciting Peanuts-themed face that places an interactive companion on your wrist.

If you like the idea of a Tamagotchi but can’t commit to caring for one, the new design will be your next best bet. Not only will Snoopy and his best friend Woodstock hang out with you around the clock, but they’ll also get up to various shenanigans each time you raise your wrist.

At times, the cartoon beagle lounges on the hour hand. He reacts to the weather and gets active when you are. Occasionally, he may play basketball or go surfing. When your Apple Watch goes to sleep, that’s his cue to rest his eyes too.

The Snoopy Watch face on Apple Watch is the GREATEST THING THAT’S EVER HAPPENED pic.twitter.com/UNfS407kWT

— Fee McBee (@feemcbee) September 18, 2023

I am in love with the new Snoopy watch face on my Apple Watch. pic.twitter.com/IJp9V3Th8k

— Brian M (@myersdiz) September 19, 2023

An awesome touch is that when your Apple Watch face has a black and white background, it’ll be imbued with color on Sundays à la the Peanuts newspaper comic strips, per Apple software engineering manager Michael Kent.

I hope you all noticed today: the best thing about the new Snoopy watch face is that most days it has a plain black and white background but on Sundays you get a colorful background on every wrist raise, just like comic strips in newspapers! pic.twitter.com/V7gwJqAlZ8

— Michael Kent (@___mkultra) June 12, 2023

In total, the Watch face encompasses 148 distinct animations lasting 12 minutes.

The devotion to breathing life into the cartoon characters in their new digital home might be unnecessary, but it’s a good thing Apple and Charles M Schulz Creative Associates went crazy with it. And it turns out there was even more effort put into the project than you might have thought. In an interview with GQ magazine, Paige Braddock, chief creative officer at Charles M Schulz Creative Associates notes the absurdity of “the minutiae we go into [making the images] work at every angle.”

Snoopy Apple Watch watch face is 🔥#AppleEvent pic.twitter.com/Ojn6ZKIkxP

— Ray Wong (@raywongy) September 12, 2023

For an experience that’s as dynamic as possible, the Apple Watch team gave the face a “Snoopy decision engine” that chose which scenes to display to avoid repetition. They also developed a “scene layout engine” that altered the animations by six degrees every minute.

Conceptual designs were littered across 148 sheets of blank paper during a meeting between both companies. They didn’t just include generic ones but also “very specific Snoopy things,” like when the beagle holds up his ear, Braddock elaborates.

The team also agonized over which version of Snoopy should appear on the watch, as his design has evolved over the last 70-plus years. In the end, they went with a compromise between the 1970s and 1990s look, which gives the dog a shorter nose than the former variation and a straighter one than the latter.

[via AppleInsider, GQ, Digital Trends, images via various sources]