A number is not a plan
Apple just threw everything it has at measuring you more precisely. But measurement hasn’t been the main problem for a while now.
Two big announcements yesterday, and they seem to rhyme.
The watch now reads your heart rate every five seconds and your HRV every five minutes. 24x more often than last year. They ran a study on over a thousand participants, across demographic groups, against the leading wearables, to prove it’s the most accurate sensor on any wrist. I believe them. It’s real engineering, and there are maybe three companies on earth that could have done it.
The one that got less attention: you’ll be able to order a 50+ biomarker blood panel from inside the Health app for $119. Quest does the draw, 2,000 locations. Function Health charges $365 a year for roughly this, Superpower $349. Function runs its own draws through Quest. So Apple rented their lab and undercut them by two thirds.
Measure your wrist better. Measure your blood cheaper. Apple’s gameplan is clear.
But picture the moment this is supposed to help with
It’s Sunday night. You slept badly all week. Tomorrow is meetings from 8am and a flight at 6. You’re tired just thinking about it. You open the app: 4 out of 10. Pace Yourself.
Okay... pace myself how?
The meetings are happening. The flight is booked. What am I supposed to do between now and bed? Eat earlier? Drop the workout I had planned, or just shorten it? Push the 8am to 9? Go to bed at 9:30 and accept I’ll be staring at the ceiling at 2? Those are real decisions with real tradeoffs, and the app has an opinion about none of them.
That’s always been the gap. And the tell is the calendar.
Every input is a record of the past
Apple lists three inputs into Readiness: recent activity, vitals, sleep score. All three are records of what your body already did.
Apple owns your calendar. It knows about the 8am and the 6pm flight. Didn’t use it.
Not because they couldn’t. Because they’re answering a different question. Theirs is how accurately can we measure this person. The question the person has is what do I do tomorrow. Those look adjacent and they are not. The first one gets solved by better hardware, which is why Apple is winning it. The second one requires knowing what tomorrow actually contains, and no sensor will ever tell you that. Your calendar already does.
Garmin got here in 2018
Body Battery shipped on the vivosmart 4 in August 2018. A $129 band. Its inputs were sleep, resting heart rate, HRV, workouts, activity, and stress. Which is, give or take, the list Apple published yesterday.
Eight years, a genuinely better sensor, and the same shape of answer at the end of it.
When companies with different hardware, different price points, and different decades all converge on handing you a number, that’s a decent sign the number was never the hard part.
Nobody wakes up wanting to know their HRV
People want to stop feeling like garbage on Wednesday.
The measurement was always supposed to be the means. This industry has spent a decade treating it as the end, and yesterday was the latest step down that path, taken with more resources than anyone has ever brought to it.
“Pace Yourself” is a vibe masquerading as a recommendation. A number is not a plan.
Worth saying the unflattering part too. Free and already on your wrist beats better and in another app, for most people, most of the time. That applies to everyone in this category, us included. Apple made the measurement layer free this week, and anyone whose product was the measurement should be nervous.
I just don’t think the measurement was the product.
What I want
Something that makes sense of all the numbers and tells me what to actually do about them. Reads the sleep, the food, the training, and the calendar as one picture, and gives me one move for today.
That’s what we’ve been building at Preffect.