There's no way Apple would design any device which would, I quote, "insert a thin, sterile filament into the skin" to draw interstitial fluid. The Abbott sensor is designed to be worn for weeks on end.
They could miniaturize a specialized spectrometer of some sort I suppose. I don't know. If I knew, I'd be doing it now - that's quite literally tens of billions of dollars that people would throw at you faster than you'd be able to catch it.
'January 2017 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company unveiled the Changhong H2 with NIR spectrometer', not sure if this was ever released, but suggests miniature spectrometry is a thing...
"Rockley Photonics says that its system uses infrared spectrophotometers to detect and monitor a wider range of health issue than the green LED systems in most wrist devices."
I also remember paging through this fascinating investor presentation document from Rockley:
Looking at Rockley stuff in particular makes me hopeful this could be solved, if it's solvable with spectrophotometry at all. I'd even be OK with something larger, perhaps ankle-worn, as long as I don't have to puncture my skin at all.
