Todd Haselton Reviews Apple Fitness+

Todd Haselton, writing for CNBC:

Fitness+ is excellent. Should you pick it over Peloton? Tough call.

This is the part of a review is where I’d normally say if you should buy something or not, but both Fitness+ and the Peloton app come with free one-month trials. And anyone who bought a new Apple Watch this year gets a three-month trial. So, really, you should try both and see which one you like better. I’m pretty torn right now.

If the biggest downside is that Fitness+ requires you to own an Apple Watch — a sentiment echoed by Nicole Nguyen in her Fitness+ review for the WSJ (News+ link) — it’s not really much of a downside at all. I don’t think it’s a streaming fitness service that’s forcing you to buy a $200-300 watch; I think it’s more like a $10/month fitness service for Apple Watch owners. Apple is very up-front about the “requires an Apple Watch” aspect of Fitness+. It’s like saying the downside of Apple Arcade is that you need an iPhone or iPad to play the games.

One interesting technical note: on Apple TV, the Fitness app will look for Apple Watch wearers in the same room, making it seamless for multiple members of the same family to work out using a shared TV (albeit one at a time). This integration between the Apple TV hardware and Apple Watch even works on anyone’s Apple TV, so if you’re at a friend or family member’s house, or at a public facility with Apple TV, you can work out with Fitness+ as you, with your activity history and settings, without taking over as the signed-in iCloud/iTunes account system-wide on the Apple TV. That’s pretty cool.

★ Monday, 14 December 2020