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Apple Fitness+ Takes Over Apple's Home Page to Help You Reach Your New Year's Goals

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With 2023 now upon us, many people are setting New Year's resolutions and one of the more popular ones is always a desire to get into better shape. To entice those looking for some help reaching that goal, Apple has turned over its home page to Fitness+, the company's subscription service with thousands of workouts across nearly a dozen different types.

apple-fitness-year-of-you.jpg

Kicking off with the tagline "Welcome to the year of you," Apple's home page also notes that "Now all you need is iPhone," a nod to a change in iOS 16.1 that allows Fitness+ to be used without an Apple Watch.

While Fitness+ can be used with only an iPhone, an Apple Watch offers more utility by allowing real‑time, personalized metrics to be displayed onscreen, including your heart rate, Burn Bar, and activity rings.

Apple Fitness+ is priced at $9.99 per month or $79.99 per year, or it can be bundled with other Apple services in an Apple One Premier subscription. A single Apple Fitness+ subscription can be shared with up to five other family members and it comes with a free one-month trial for all users. Users who purchase a new iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, or Apple TV qualify for a free three-month trial.

Article Link: Apple Fitness+ Takes Over Apple's Home Page to Help You Reach Your New Year's Goals
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2023/01/02/apple-fitness-2023-home-page-takeover/
AF+ changed my life. It’s supremely motivating to me. Went from completely sedentary to exercising 1+ hours a day, everyday.

Could you do something on your own, or just watch YouTube videos? Yes. But if you want consistently high quality instruction with a great variety of content - that is accessible to many fitness and experience levels - you can’t go wrong. Got nothing to lose if you can get a free trial.

Edit: and $80 for a year seems like a steal to me especially considering you get access to all the mindfulness/meditation content as well as more traditional exercises.
 
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User 6502 said:
It can take over all the pages it wants, it remains an overpriced mediocre offering.
Click to expand...
Hard disagree.

It’s a great compliment in the winter (it snows here) for indoor exercises. They’re inclusive of people who may not have the same range of motion or be at the instructors fitness level and they make you feel like you’re welcome if you’re overweight (they have overweight people in the workouts too). Quiet honestly, no other service provides what they do (health tracking on screen, music that is playing, inclusive alternates to the workout, some sign language, captions, etc.). Wife and I use it regularly.
 
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QuarterSwede said:
Hard disagree.

It’s a great compliment in the winter (it snows here) for indoor exercises. They’re inclusive of people who may not have the same range of motion or be at the instructors fitness level and they make you feel like you’re welcome if you’re overweight (they have overweight people in the workouts too). Quiet honestly, no other service provides what they do (health tracking on screen, music that is playing, inclusive alternates to the workout, some sign language, captions, etc.). Wife and I use it regularly.
Click to expand...

The problem is that it's a BUNDLE of various offerings, with no apparent way to pick and choose what people want, and different people want different things.
For example I have
- ZERO interest in trainers. Not once, not EVER.
- some mild interest in seeing video that suggest new workouts and show how to do them. But I only want to see them once or twice, not all the time.
- substantial interest in seeing my workout stats in a corner of the TV while I watch the content *I CHOOSE* while exercising.

Apple is uninterested in people like me; what they want to sell is trainers and screw anyone who isn't interested in trainers.
 
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FrenziedEngi said:
AF+ changed my life. It’s supremely motivating to me. Went from completely sedentary to exercising 1+ hours a day, everyday.
Click to expand...

While the Apple fitness/health apps are unimportant to me (and at times I‘ve criticized them) this is a wonderfully positive post to read. If AF+ helps to light and keep that fire burning it is well worth it. Best wishes on your 2023 fitness goals!
 
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zinacef said:
Well Lincoln did say - “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”.
Click to expand...
Disageee, with software you can easily please all the people all of the time. You can have people choose the experience they want to have rather than trying to shove down their throats what suits you. But apple became a very anti customer company, and it shows in products such as this one.
 
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I’ve gone from loving it to just being fed up with it/Apple services. How many times am I supposed to launch a workout, only to be told it can’t connect to the watch? Or not have my heartrate being monitored and displayed? Or just have the workout lag and hang? I‘ve spent some workouts waiting longer for the buffering to catch up that I actually worked out. Kinda kills the spirit of the effort. Apple‘s response is make sure my internet is working. Like it’s my fault. I have 400 mbps consistently and it only needs 100 supposedly. So Apple pushes the problem to my side. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ not inclined to use it anymore. Really did enjoy the cycling and rowing workouts when they actually worked.
 
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MacRumors said:


With 2023 now upon us, many people are setting New Year's resolutions and one of the more popular ones is always a desire to get into better shape. To entice those looking for some help reaching that goal, Apple has turned over its home page to Fitness+, the company's subscription service with thousands of workouts across nearly a dozen different types.

apple-fitness-year-of-you.jpg

Kicking off with the tagline "Welcome to the year of you," Apple's home page also notes that "Now all you need is iPhone," a nod to a change in iOS 16.1 that allows Fitness+ to be used without an Apple Watch.

While Fitness+ can be used with only an iPhone, an Apple Watch offers more utility by allowing real‑time, personalized metrics to be displayed onscreen, including your heart rate, Burn Bar, and activity rings.

Apple Fitness+ is priced at $9.99 per month or $79.99 per year, or it can be bundled with other Apple services in an Apple One Premier subscription. A single Apple Fitness+ subscription can be shared with up to five other family members and it comes with a free one-month trial for all users. Users who purchase a new iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, or Apple TV qualify for a free three-month trial.

Article Link: Apple Fitness+ Takes Over Apple's Home Page to Help You Reach Your New Year's Goals
Click to expand...
A huge fan of Apple Fitness+, and my wife even more so. No traipsing to a gym after work, especially after a long commute, much more variety than either of us would ever do, and of course we can do it very easily on holiday/vacation too.
 
User 6502 said:
Disageee, with software you can easily please all the people all of the time. You can have people choose the experience they want to have rather than trying to shove down their throats what suits you. But apple became a very anti customer company, and it shows in products such as this one.
Click to expand...
Since Apple and its products and services don’t suit you perhaps it prudent you seek another platform to please your tastes?
 
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zinacef said:
Since Apple and its products and services don’t suit you perhaps it prudent you seek another platform to please your tastes?
Click to expand...
Which is what I did with fitness+: I ignored apple’s bad offering and bought other better services. That doesn’t mean I can’t keep criticising apple’s product.
 
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All I want is the ability to turn off the music (while keeping the instructor prompts). If they ever do that I might try it out. But it’s pretty clear they won’t ever do that.
 
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Takeo said:
All I want is the ability to turn off the music (while keeping the instructor prompts). If they ever do that I might try it out. But it’s pretty clear they won’t ever do that.
Click to expand...

Turn on captions and turn down the volume?

You can submit feedback here:
www.apple.com

Product Feedback

We would love to hear your comments about any of our hardware and software products. Send us your thoughts.
www.apple.com
 
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User 6502 said:
Which is what I did with fitness+: I ignored apple’s bad offering and bought other better services. That doesn’t mean I can’t keep criticising apple’s product.
Click to expand...
By all means, after all, one of the primary purposes of this forum’s platform is to air one’s grievances such as you have done, whilst also engaging in meaningful and helpful discourse.
 
I wish I could use it but it's not really feasible since I'm living above other units in an apartment building who would complain if I started jumping up and down to do the workouts. This definitely seems like something for people who live in suburbs vs people who live in higher-density cities and live closer to a gym.
 
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I bought the year sub to pair with my DeskCycle that I got for Christmas. I had used my free trial before the pandemic and didn't get much out of it.

I have to give Apple credit though. When they first introduced Fitness Plus, I felt left out as a blind person, especially when one of the trainers is also disabled. That didn't seem like a good look to me, even though logically I wondered how they could translate something that is so heavily visual into something that could be understood by someone who can't see. Apple sent me a survey about my series 5 aw, and I gave them some suggestions out how I thought they could make the workouts more accessible.

The solution they ended up implementing, audio hints, was a lot different from what I thought they would do. From the little I've played with so far, it seems like they've generated ML descriptions that are a lot like what movies and TV shows have, E.G. a TTS voice will say "he/she drinks water" at the end of a workout. VoiceOver itself still reads all the text that pops up, like your heart rate or where you are on the burn bar.

Is it perfect? No. While AH gives brief descriptions of what the trainers do that they don't verbalize, it doesn't help much if you don't know how to do the movements they are. I tried a yoga workout the other day and the AH would say something like "small hinge", but never having tried yoga before, I have no idea what that even is. I've tried to Google descriptions of different yoga poses, but they were hard to follow. Sometimes stuff like that is just better explained with someone physically able to show you, which isn't always available. Nothing Apple can do about that.
 
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