An Apple Watch exclusive fitness service, Apple Fitness+ will be available on December 14 and ahead of launch Jay Blahnik, Apple’s senior director of fitness technologies sat down with WSJ. Magazine to discuss the purpose, and features of the new service.
Besides other new products this year, the Cupertino tech giant is launching its home fitness service during a pandemic and the timing is just coincidental. Blahnik told the publisher that “It does feel like people might think we built Fitness+ because of Covid. But we’ve been working on it for a very, very long time.”
Apple’s focus on the growth of its subscription-based services like Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple News, and others has been lucrative for the company especially in the COVID-19 pandemic. And Apple Fitness+ could not have launched at a more suitable time than the current. With a large number of people at home with restricted mobility, Apple Fitness+ will provide them workouts according to their needs and level.
Jay Blahnik talk about Apple Fitness+
Apple has always marketed Apple Watch as a health monitoring device that enables users to keep track of their daily activity, complete workouts, take EGC (*select models), menstruation cycles, sleep, and much more. As an addition to health-related features, Jay Blahnik explained that Apple Fitness+ will only be available to Apple Watch owners because “metrics” encourage people to continue on their fitness journey.
“Metrics is motivation. The metrics react to the things the trainer says and the things that you do. We believe that makes it much more immersive than simply following content that’s available anywhere else.”
As an Apple Watch exclusive service, Blahnik tells the publishers that it would further expand the company’s subscription bases. He said,
Fitness has been a really big part of [its] story.With the launch of Fitness+, however, Apple aims to create a new ecosystem for the watch: a subscription-based, on-demand virtual-fitness studio, with an initial 21-person team of trainers (recruited after an intensive search, in which Apple says “no gym was too gritty for us to go into”), covering 10 disciplines—from high-intensity interval training to dance workouts to rowing to “mindful cooldowns”—offering a fresh slate of workouts, of varying lengths, every week (all set to the beat of Apple Music).
He expressed that as music is an important aspect of any workout for motivation, all the workouts on the new home fitness service are centered around it.
“We love the fact that Fitness+ is integrated with Apple Watch. It’s really inclusive. We put music at the center to motivate a wide variety of people. We’ve made it really easy to find your next workout, whether you’re a beginner or not, and allowed you to use it across all your screens.” He sums things up with a running metaphor: “We treat all areas that we get engaged with as marathons, not sprints.”
Blahnik also added that the service intelligently suggests new workouts to uses based on their daily routines and what should they try next for a change.
Initially, Apple Fitness+ will be available in the U.S., Canada, the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia for $9.99 per month or $79.99 per year with a one-month free trial period. It is compatible with Apple Series 3 or later on watchOS 7.2 paired with iPhone 6s or later on iOS 14.3. To run on bigger screens, the service requires iPad Pro, 5th-gen iPad or later, iPad mini or later, iPad Air 2 or 3rd-gen iPad Air, Apple TV 4K and Apple TV HD.
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