Apple probably planned special Apple Watch bands for this year's Olympics – before it was posponed

By Oliver Haslam
published

Apple Watch Olympic Bands Jpn
Apple Watch Olympic Bands Jpn (Image credit: @L0vetodream)

What you need to know

  • New images of country-specific Apple Watch bands have appeared on Twitter.
  • They were shared by anonymous leaker @L0vetodream.
  • They use the country's flag's colors and feature an abbreviation of its name.

New images of unreleased Apple Watch bands have appeared online and it seems they were designed for the 2020 Olympics. The Olympics that never happened.

The bands, images of which were shared on Twitter by anonymous leaker @L0vetodream, seem to use the colors of a country's flag and feature an abbreviation of its name on the inside.

https://twitter.com/L0vetodream/status/1310267844441985024

I saw these images earlier today and it never crossed my mind that these bands might be related to the Olympics. But now the folks at MacRumors have pointed it out, it makes perfect sense. Similar bands were produced during the 2016 Olympics and Apple would likely do something similar in 2020.

Apple Watch Olympic Bands Den

Apple Watch Olympic Bands Den (Image credit: @L0vetodream)

With the Olympics postponed, these bands never saw the light of day. Hopefully, they'll make an appearance when the Olympics finally kick off – starting Friday, July 23, 2021.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.