Tag Archives: fitness band

Apple may launch a “Watch Air” screen-less health tracker to compete with Whoop and Fitbit Air

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For anyone who thinks Apple would never launch a screenless Watch, let me remind you of two, nay, three things. First, the iPod Shuffle – a product that baffled many, but delighted even more. For anyone who couldn’t afford an iPod Classic or Nano, the screenless Shuffle was the instant next pick. You couldn’t do much, play-pause, move across a randomized roster of tracks, and adjust volume. As limiting as this experience was, it still a smash success, selling 10 million units in just its first year.

The second bit of evidence I’d like to offer is the rumor that Apple’s been working on a smart ring to take on Samsung, Oura, and a bunch of other players that are slowly annexing this particular domain. The third is just a follow-up to the second – While smart rings are gaining a fair bit of popularity, Apple’s true competition is coming from an absolutely unexpected source – a small upstart called Whoop that’s captured the fitness band market, with big names sporting Whoop bands. Think of Whoop as the Beats by Dre of the fitness world… and you know what happened to Beats by Dre, right?

Designer: Tech Town

Apple Watch 'Air' health tracker concept in Cosmic Orange colorway

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported in early August that Apple’s industrial design team has spent roughly the past year exploring what he called, in his own words, “something that transforms the product for a new era,” comparing the scale of the rethink to the iPhone’s jump from a slab to a foldable. A screenless band sits at the center of that exploration, alongside a round display concept Gurman says is unlikely to ship, plus new price tiers above the Ultra and Hermès range and below the SE. Nothing here is close to final. No sensors, no name, no price, no date. Apple hasn’t committed to any of it, and Gurman’s own reporting frames the screenless band as the most plausible of the bunch precisely because the rest of the wearable market has already proven the category works.

Apple Watch 'Air' health tracker concept in Mist Blue colorway

Apple has quietly, well, not quietly, actually already built the brain this device would need, and shipped it on your wrist this month. The Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 launched September 18 with a new Readiness app, a daily score from 0 to 10 built from recent activity, overnight vitals, and sleep, closing with a recommendation of Recover, Pace Yourself, Ready, or Go For It. Apple now samples HRV every five minutes, a figure it says is 24 times denser than what Series 11 could manage, and splits the reading into overall HRV and a Recovery HRV compared against your personal baseline rather than a population average. That is, functionally, a Whoop screen for readiness with the screen still attached to a watch. Strip the display away, keep the sensor stack and the scoring engine, and you have the pitch for a Watch Air in one sentence.

Apple Watch 'Air' health tracker concept in Titanium colorway

The person pushing hardest for that strip down sits above Apple’s entire health division. Eddy Cue took over health and fitness oversight from outgoing COO Jeff Williams in late 2025 and has reportedly told colleagues Apple needs to move faster in the category. Cue’s personal habit gives the story its bite: he wears both Oura and Whoop, executive shorthand for admitting the Health app hasn’t caught up to the devices its own leadership prefers on their wrists. An ambitious AI coaching project internally called Mulberry was scaled back after Cue’s arrival, redirected instead toward folding more of its intelligence straight into the core Health app rather than a paid add on layer.

The market Apple would be entering has filled in fast. Google’s Fitbit Air launched in May at $99.99, a 5.2 gram pod with no screen and no buttons, just a double tap gesture and a battery LED. Garmin’s Cirqa followed at $199.99 with a single physical side button and no subscription requirement, offering roughly 10 days of battery against the Air’s 7. Whoop 5.0 anchors the premium end at 14 days of battery, but the hardware means nothing without an active membership starting around $199 a year, the one structural weakness Apple’s own retail model was built to avoid.

Apple Watch 'Air' health tracker concept without the wristband

A round Apple Watch is, per Gurman, unlikely to happen, and the smart ring has been shelved and revived in rumor form so many times it barely qualifies as news anymore. The screenless band is different. It borrows a software system Apple has already shipped, it targets a price umbrella Apple has never fully occupied below the SE, and it answers a habit Cue is reportedly living out loud every morning. None of that guarantees a 2027 launch. But the Shuffle taught Apple that taking something away can sell just as well as adding something new, and this time, the thing it would be taking away is the one part of the Apple Watch nobody asked to keep charging every single night.

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Garmin Just Built the Whoop Alternative That Needs No Subscription

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There’s a growing frustration with fitness wearables that has nothing to do with their accuracy or features. It’s the screen. Even devices that track recovery and stress can contribute to the same screen-checking habit they’re supposed to help reduce, turning what should be a passive health monitor into just another thing demanding attention on your wrist. The smartwatch category has leaned further into displays, notifications, and apps, leaving a gap for something that doesn’t do any of that.

The Garmin CIRQA is Garmin’s first screen-free smart band, and the pitch is straightforward. It tracks everything, shows you nothing on the wrist, and routes all the data to the Garmin Connect app for review when you actually want to look. There’s no display to glance at, no notifications, no interface to interact with during the day. The band does its job in the background, and you check the results on your terms.

Designer: Garmin

Worn on the wrist or moved up to the upper arm for sleeping or specific activities, the CIRQA runs 24 hours a day on a single charge for up to ten days. The sensor stack covers all the metrics Garmin is known for: continuous heart rate, Body Battery energy monitoring, Pulse Ox, stress, skin temperature, HRV status, and comprehensive sleep tracking including sleep stages, a sleep score, and nap detection. Women can also track their menstrual cycle and sync skin temperature data with the FDA-cleared Natural Cycles birth control app.

Fitness tracking doesn’t require picking up the phone either. The band detects and records activities automatically, and the more you review and correct those logs in Garmin Connect, the better it gets at classifying your workouts without prompting. For sessions where you want more control, a single side button lets you manually start any of 80-plus activities. Connected GPS borrows location data from a paired smartphone for accurate outdoor pace and distance, and LiveTrack lets people follow your route in real time.

The monitoring side goes deeper than basic step counting. Training readiness, VO2 Max estimates, and workout recovery time give athletes a fuller picture of whether a day calls for a hard effort or an easy spin. The CIRQA was built to complement Garmin’s watch lineup rather than replace it. Someone who already runs with a Forerunner can use the CIRQA to handle overnight recovery and all-day wellness without wearing the watch to bed or to the office.

The band comes in a soft ComfortFit fabric strap that Garmin designed to fade into the background and sits in a compact sensor module with a fiber-reinforced polymer housing. Colors include Black, French Gray, Berry, and Navy, with seven additional accessory band options for the wrist. Both wrist and upper-arm sizing are available in two fits.

The CIRQA Smart Band is priced at $199.99, and no subscription is required for the core feature set, which is a pointed difference from Whoop, the most obvious comparison in this category. Garmin does offer optional Connect+ upgrades for coaching and advanced guidance, but the full tracking stack works without it.

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Your Fitness Tracker Has Too Much Screen, The $100 Fitbit Air Has None

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Most fitness trackers have followed the same design logic for years: a screen on the wrist that flashes step counts, shows incoming messages, and turns the whole device into a smaller, sweatproof version of your phone. That approach has its fans, but it also has a ceiling. Screens add bulk, drain batteries, and tempt you to keep checking things you probably didn’t need to check while trying to fall asleep.

Fitbit Air is Google’s answer to what a fitness tracker looks like when the screen comes off entirely. It’s the smallest Fitbit ever made, weighing roughly five grams on its own and about 12g with a band, and it has nothing on its face except a slim oval housing made from recycled polycarbonate. No display, no haptic button, no notification feed; just sensors doing their job quietly and continuously.

Designer: Google

That doesn’t mean there’s less happening inside. The Air carries an optical heart rate monitor, a three-axis accelerometer and gyroscope, red and infrared sensors for blood oxygen monitoring, and a device temperature sensor. Together, these maintain a continuous record of heart rate, heart rate variability, resting heart rate, oxygen saturation, and sleep stages, while also flagging irregular heart rhythms along the way without any input from the wearer.

Wear it to bed, and it tracks sleep stages through the night without lighting up or buzzing. Take it through a workout, and it recognizes the activity automatically. The battery lasts up to seven days under normal use, and a five-minute top-up adds another full day when the charge runs low. Water resistance reaches 50 meters, so showers, swimming, and sweaty training sessions don’t require a second thought.

The data flows into the Google Health app, which is where the Air actually earns its keep. Built on Gemini, Google Health Coach reads everything the tracker has collected and turns it into something genuinely useful: personalized recommendations, recovery guidance, trend analysis, and answers to specific questions about why you might be feeling tired after travel or how to adjust training around an injury, all based on your actual biometrics.

The app works the same way with Pixel Watch, meaning the Air can slot into an existing Google wearables setup or work entirely on its own. Wearing both simultaneously is supported, health data syncs automatically, and the app lets you sort metrics by device. For someone who already carries a Pixel Watch but wants continuous overnight tracking without the bulk of a full smartwatch, the Air fills that gap neatly.

Fitbit Air is available for preorder at $99.99, with first shipments scheduled for May 26. That price includes three months of Google Health Premium, which unlocks full access to Health Coach. After the trial, continuing the service runs $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year. A Stephen Curry Special Edition runs $129.99, and interchangeable accessory bands start at $34.99, compatible with Android and iOS.

Compared to other services that charge nothing upfront but require a subscription from the start, the Air’s $99.99 entry price is a more accessible way in. As a device you’re genuinely not meant to look at, its value lives almost entirely in the software behind it; the band gathers, and Google Health interprets. For a tracker specifically designed to be forgotten on the wrist, that’s a quietly compelling arrangement.

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