WSJ. Magazine:

“It does feel like people might think we built Fitness+ because of Covid,” Jay Blahnik, Apple’s senior director of fitness technologies, tells me via a video call from the company’s fitness studio in Los Angeles. “But we’ve been working on it for a very, very long time.”

And:

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).

And:

“We have a carousel called ‘Try Something New.’ So if you tend to do more linear workouts, like running or cycling, you would be suggested things like HIIT [high-intensity interval training] or yoga, that would move your body in different directions.”

And:

What Apple is pursuing, suggests Benedict Evans, a former partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a longtime tech-industry analyst, is a “broader bundling strategy”; the new AppleOne, for example, includes Fitness+ along with services like iCloud and Arcade. The company, he says, is “trying to create more perceived value without adding marginal cost.” And, importantly, it adds value to the watch itself, which Evans suggests, “hasn’t worked really well as a developer platform”—in other words, “most of the stuff you do with it comes with it.” Fitness+ is a logical evolution of the watch that could increase its relevance for many users.

Lots more in the article itself. I linked to the Apple News version of the article, but here’s a link to the version on the WSJ site.

I am very interested in how Fitness+ interacts with Apple Watch. There seems to be the promise of a new set of interface mechanisms, highlighting progress in a different way than the current simple tally of minutes and calories burned. Looking forward to Monday’s launch.