CNBC Anchor — Closing Bell: Overtime & Fortt Knox
Jon Fortt's Apple Watch Series 11: Twenty-Five Years Covering Tech, and He Chose This One
He was covering the internet revolution from Silicon Valley in 1999. He has interviewed Satya Nadella, Andy Jassy, Lisa Su, and Michael Dell. He co-anchors Closing Bell: Overtime on CNBC and hosts Fortt Knox, his own interview brand that has been running since 2016. Jon Fortt has spent a quarter century understanding what technology actually does versus what it promises to do. The Apple Watch Series 11 on his wrist is not a fashion statement. It is the considered choice of someone who has watched Apple longer than most people have owned a smartphone.
| Jon Fortt — Apple Watch Series 11 on wrist. Source: CNBC / YouTube |
Jon Fortt — co-anchor, Closing Bell: Overtime; creator, Fortt Knox |
▶ Source: YouTube
Jon Fortt was born December 12, 1976, and began his journalism career in Lexington, Kentucky, before moving to Silicon Valley in 1999 to cover what was then called the online revolution. He spent seven years at the San Jose Mercury News — Silicon Valley's hometown newspaper — reporting on the companies and trends that were remaking commerce, communication, and culture in real time. He won awards from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers for his work there. He then moved to Business 2.0 as a senior editor, followed by Fortune magazine as a senior writer, where he covered Apple, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft, and tracked the emergence of cloud computing and the smartphone revolution from the press rooms and product launches where those stories were breaking first.
He joined CNBC in July 2010 as a technology correspondent based in the Silicon Valley bureau, then moved to the network's Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey headquarters in 2013, where he co-anchored Squawk Alley, TechCheck, and now Closing Bell: Overtime, which runs weekdays from 4 to 5 PM. He created the weekly Squawk Box segment "On the Other Hand" — a one-man debate arguing both sides of a contested business or technology issue — and the "Working Lunch" segment on Power Lunch, which surfaces CEO interviews from his independent work. He graduated from DePauw University as a Media Fellow with a degree in English, and in 2020 created The Black Experience in America: The Course, an online educational resource on history and culture.
Since 2016, Fortt has run Fortt Knox — a multimedia interview brand that began as a podcast, evolved into a livestream, and now operates as a video series and community primarily on LinkedIn. His guests have included Satya Nadella (Microsoft CEO), Andy Jassy (Amazon CEO), Michael Dell, Reid Hoffman, Lisa Su (AMD CEO), Adena Friedman, Daymond John, Michael Phelps, and Q-Tip. The consistent theme across all of it: how leaders think, how innovation actually happens, and what technology is genuinely changing versus what it merely claims to.
"I started covering tech in 1999, in Lexington, Kentucky. Later that year I moved to Silicon Valley to cover the online revolution." — Jon Fortt, LinkedIn
Timepiece
Apple Watch Series 11
Released September 2025, the Apple Watch Series 11 is Apple's current flagship smartwatch — and its thinnest, most comfortable design to date. The aluminium models feature a display protected by Ion-X glass rated twice as scratch-resistant as the previous generation. 5G cellular connectivity is available on supported models, enabling calls, messages, and data access entirely without an iPhone nearby. Battery life reaches up to 24 hours — an improvement over prior Series models. The watch runs watchOS 26, which includes Apple Intelligence enhancements, among them Workout Buddy, an AI-powered coaching tool.
The Series 11's most significant health addition is hypertension notifications — the watch can detect signs of chronic high blood pressure over time and alert the wearer to seek medical evaluation. Combined with the existing suite of ECG, blood oxygen, heart rate monitoring, sleep score insights, fall detection, and car crash detection, the Series 11 represents the most complete health monitoring system Apple has built into a watch. For a professional in a high-pressure live broadcast environment, managing a production schedule, a podcast operation, and an independent media company simultaneously, the watch that monitors the body as persistently as the career demands attention is an obvious fit.
| Model | Apple Watch Series 11 — released September 2025 |
| Design | Thinnest Apple Watch to date — aluminium or titanium case |
| Display | Always-on Retina — 2x tougher Ion-X glass on aluminium models |
| Health — new | Hypertension notifications — detects chronic high blood pressure signs |
| Health — existing | ECG, blood oxygen, heart rate alerts, sleep score insights, fall & crash detection |
| Connectivity | 5G cellular (supported models) — calls, messages, data without iPhone |
| Software | watchOS 26 with Apple Intelligence — including Workout Buddy |
| Battery | Up to 24 hours — improved over prior Series models |
| Starting price | From $399 (GPS) / higher for cellular and titanium |
The Informed Choice
Jon Fortt was writing about Apple from Fortune magazine before the iPhone existed. He covered the smartphone revolution as it happened, in the publications and from the bureau closest to it. He has interviewed the CEOs of the companies that make the components inside the Apple Watch — the chip architects, the software executives, the platform leaders. When he wears an Apple Watch Series 11 on the set of Closing Bell: Overtime, he is not wearing it because a publicist suggested it or because it is this season's technology accessory. He is wearing the product of an industry he has tracked for a quarter century, made by a company he has covered through product cycles, leadership transitions, supply chain crises, and moments of genuine invention.
That context matters. The Apple Watch's health monitoring suite — and particularly the Series 11's new hypertension notifications — represents exactly the kind of genuinely useful technology Fortt has spent his career distinguishing from the merely impressive. Detecting signs of chronic high blood pressure over time, on a device worn as naturally as a wristwatch, without requiring a conscious decision to monitor: this is the kind of application that changes behaviour rather than supplementing it. Fortt covers companies that claim to be changing the world. The Apple Watch on his wrist is one of the ones that has actually done it quietly, on millions of wrists, without a press release per health outcome.
The Arc from 1999 to the Series 11
Fortt started covering the internet in 1999 — the year Google filed its first patent, the year Napster launched, the year Silicon Valley was still arguing about whether e-commerce was real. He has watched every Apple product cycle since, from the press events to the quarterly earnings calls to the interviews with the people who design and build and sell these devices. The Apple Watch Series 11 is the tenth generation of a product category that did not exist when he started his career. It monitors hypertension. It runs AI-powered workout coaching. It connects to 5G without a phone in the room. He is wearing it on a CNBC set in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, in 2025, and it is the most natural thing in the world — for a journalist who has spent twenty-five years understanding what technology actually becomes.
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And at Spot.Watch — that's always worth noticing.
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