Whoop published content which most certainly was to influence and convince people to buy the product, that clearly stated there was free upgrades. This has been removed as if it never happened. …
You can’t sell a subscription product making future promises, make a bunch of sales, and then take away those advertised benefits.
When reached for a comment, a Whoop spokesperson told Ars Technica that promises of free upgrades only pertained to previous launches.
Still, another Reddit user accused Whoop of performing a “bait and switch,” and a third said, “Just spent my first week with Whoop 4.0 and see all that has hit today. Looks like I’ll be returning and already walking away from the company.”
The statement shared by Whoop’s representative added:
With the launch of the WHOOP 5.0, we’ve worked to make WHOOP more accessible to more people and are now offering three tiers of membership, including our lowest price point ever with WHOOP One at $199. The WHOOP 4.0 will also continue to be supported, with members receiving new features available on our Peak membership.
Making adjustments
Whoop’s about-face is an increasingly common story as companies that launched during the initial Internet of Things (IoT) craze get a clearer idea of what they need to do to stay in business. In addition to changing its approach to upgrades, Whoop previously stopped selling monthly subscriptions to new customers. Its new devices, meanwhile, have more advanced features, including ECG capabilities and longer battery life claims, that likely add to associated costs.
Wearables are a relatively new type of gadget, and some firms, like Whoop, are still trying to figure out the best way to make money with them. That may mean going to market differently than a decade ago. Whoop customers will have to decide if the company’s offerings are worth dealing with the updated strategy and potential future changes.
Things are still uncertain, but OnePlus claims to have made some adjustments to its supply chain so it can offer the Watch 3 at a more palatable price. It’s unlikely that OnePlus could eat the cost of that Chinese tariff on a wearable, so perhaps it found a way to redirect its shipments through another location with lower tariffs.
A company spokesperson confirms the watch is now listed at $349.99 in the US, and it will stay at that price despite any future changes to import tariffs. This is a bit higher than the original $330 price tag, but it’s not bad given the challenging market conditions and OnePlus’ Chinese roots.
“This change reflects our effort to be transparent, responsive, and committed to bringing the OnePlus Watch 3 to the US at a competitive price point, despite the ongoing market conditions,” a OnePlus spokesperson said.
At $500, the OnePlus Watch 3 was hard to justify when devices like the Pixel Watch, itself not exactly a bargain-priced wearable, are available for substantially less. Still, there are probably some OnePlus fans who bit at $500. The company says anyone who paid that price since the watch’s release in early April will get a refund of the difference—keep an eye out for an email from OnePlus support with details.
The tariff fees are typically paid on a product’s declared value rather than the retail cost. So a $170 price bump could be close to what the company’s US arm will pay to import the Watch 3 in the midst of a trade war. Many technology firms have attempted to stockpile products in the US ahead of tariffs, but it’s possible OnePlus simply couldn’t do that because it had to fix its typo.
Losing its greatest advantage?
Like past OnePlus wearables, the Watch 3 is a chunky, high-power device with a stainless steel case. It sports a massive 1.5-inch OLED screen, the latest Snapdragon W5 wearable processor, 32GB of storage, and 2GB of RAM. It runs Google’s Wear OS for smart features, but it also has a dialed-back power-saving mode that runs separate RTOS software. This robust hardware adds to the manufacturing cost, which also means higher tariffs now. As it currently stands, the Watch 3 is just too expensive given the competition.
OnePlus has managed to piece together a growing ecosystem of devices, including phones, tablets, earbuds, and, yes, smartwatches. With a combination of competitive prices and high-end specs, it successfully established a foothold in the US market, something few Chinese OEMs have accomplished.
The implications go beyond wearables. OnePlus also swings for the fences with its phone hardware, using the best Arm chips and expensive, high-end OLED panels. OnePlus tends to price its phones lower than similar Samsung and Google hardware, so it doesn’t make as much on each phone. If the tariffs stick, that strategy could be unviable.
After launching its AI Pin in April 2024 and reportedly seeking a buyout by May 2024, Humane is shutting down. Most of the people who bought an AI Pin will not get refunds for the devices, which debuted at $700, dropped to $500, and will be bricked on February 28 at noon PT.
At that time, AI Pins, which are lapel pins with an integrated AI voice assistant, camera, speaker, and laser projector, “will no longer connect to Humane’s servers,” and “all customer data, including personal identifiable information… will be permanently deleted from Humane’s servers,” according to Humane’s FAQ page. Humane also stopped selling AI pins as of yesterday and canceled any orders that had been made but not yet fulfilled. Humane said it is discontinuing the AI Pin because it’s “moving onto new endeavors.”
Those new endeavors include selling off key assets, including the AI Pin’s CosmOS operating system and intellectual property, including over 300 patents and patent applications, to HP for $116 million, HP announced on Tuesday. HP expects the acquisition to close this month.
Notably, Humane raised $241 million to make its pin and was reportedly valued at $1 billion before launch. Last year, Humane was seeking a sale price of $750 million to $1 billion, according to Bloomberg.
But the real failure is in the company’s treatment of its customers, who will only get a refund if they “are still within the 90-day return window from their original shipment date,” Humane’s FAQ page says. “All device shipments prior to November 15th, 2024, are not eligible for refunds. All refunds must be submitted by February 27th, 2025.”
AI Pins “will no longer function as a cellular device or connect to Humane’s servers. This means no calls, texts, or data usage will be possible,” according to the startup, which noted that users can’t port their phone number to another device or wireless carrier. Some offline features “like battery level” will still work, Humane said, but overall, the product will become $700 e-waste for most owners in nine days.
Other Humane charging accessories, like the Charge Pad, are said to be unaffected because Humane doesn’t use the same unnamed vendor for any parts besides the Charge Case Accessory’s battery.
Humane’s statement puts the blame on this anonymous third-party vendor. The company said it realized there was a problem when a user reported a “charging issue while using a third-party USB-C cable and third-party power source.” The company added:
Our investigation determined that the battery supplier was no longer meeting our quality standards and that certain battery cells supplied by this vendor may pose a fire safety risk. As a result, we immediately disqualified this battery vendor while we work to identify a new vendor to avoid such issues and maintain our high quality standards.
Impacted customers can get a refund for the accessory (up to $149) or a replacement via an online form. While refunds will go through within 14 business days, users seeking a replacement Charge Case Accessory have to wait until Humane makes one. That could take three to six months, the San Francisco firm estimates.
In the meantime, Humane is telling customers to properly dispose of their Charge Case Accessories (which means not throwing them in a trash can or the used battery recycling boxes found at some stores).
Another obstacle for Humane
A well-executed recall in the name of user safety isn’t automatically a death knell for a product, but Humane has already been struggling to maintain a positive reputation, and its ability to sell AI Pins in the long term was already in question before this mishap.
The AI Pin’s launch was marred by a myriad of complaints, including the pin’s inability to properly clip to some clothing, slow voice responses, short battery life, limitations with the laser projector working outside of dark rooms, and overall limited functionality. Soon after the product was released, The New York Times reported that the company’s founders, two former Apple executives, ignored negative internal reviews and even let go of an engineer who questioned the product. Humane spokesperson Zoz Cuccias admitted to The Verge in August that upon releasing the wearable, Humane “knew we were at the starting line, not the finish line.”
Google closed its Fitbit acquisition in 2021. Since then, the tech behemoth has pushed numerous changes to the wearable brand, including upcoming updates announced this week. While Google reshapes its fitness tracker business, though, some long-time users are regretting their Fitbit purchases and questioning if Google’s practices will force them to purchase their next fitness tracker elsewhere.
Generative AI coming to Fitbit (of course)
As is becoming common practice with consumer tech announcements, Google’s latest announcements about Fitbit seemed to be trying to convince users of the wonders of generative AI and how that will change their gadgets for the better. In a blog post yesterday, Dr. Karen DeSalvo, Google’s chief health officer, announced that Fitbit Premium subscribers would be able to test experimental AI features later this year (Google hasn’t specified when).
“You will be able to ask questions in a natural way and create charts just for you to help you understand your own data better. For example, you could dig deeper into how many active zone minutes… you get and the correlation with how restorative your sleep is,” she wrote.
DeSalvo’s post included an example of a user asking a chatbot if there was a connection between their sleep and activity and said that the experimental AI features will only be available to “a limited number of Android users who are enrolled in the Fitbit Labs program in the Fitbit mobile app.”
Google shared this image as an example of what future Fitbit generative AI features could look like.
Fitbit is also working with the Google Research team and “health and wellness experts, doctors, and certified coaches” to develop a large language model (LLM) for upcoming Fitbit mobile app features that pull data from Fitbit and Pixel devices, DeSalvo said. The announcement follows Google’s decision to stop selling Fitbits in places where it doesn’t sell Pixels, taking the trackers off shelves in a reported 29 countries.
In a blog post yesterday, Yossi Matias, VP of engineering and research at Google, said the company wants to use the LLM to add personalized coaching features, such as the ability to look for sleep irregularities and suggest actions “on how you might change the intensity of your workout.”
Google’s Fitbit is building the LLM on Gemini models that are tweaked on de-identified data from unspecified “research case studies,” Matias said, adding: “For example, we’re testing performance using sleep medicine certification exam-like practice tests.”
Gemini, which Google released in December, has been criticized for generating historically inaccurate images. After users complained about different races and ethnicities being inaccurately portrayed in prompts for things like Nazi members and medieval British kings, Google pulled the feature last month and said it would release a fix “soon.”In a press briefing, Florence Thng, director and product lead at Fitbit, suggested that such problems wouldn’t befall Fitbit’s LLM since it’s being tested by users before an official rollout, CNET reported.
Other recent changes to Fitbit include a name tweak from Fitbit by Google, to Google Fitbit, as spotted by 9to5Google this week.
Meanwhile, customers, especially Charge 5 users, are questioning whether their next fitness tracker will come from Fitbit Google Fitbit.
For example, in January, we reported that users were claiming that their Charge 5 suddenly started draining battery rapidly after installing a firmware update that Fitbit released in December. As of this writing, one thread discussing the problem on Fitbit’s support forum has 33 pages of comments. Google told BBC in January that it didn’t know what the problem was but knew that it wasn’t tied to firmware. Google hasn’t followed up with further explanation since. The company hasn’t responded to multiple requests from Ars Technica for comment. In the meantime, users continue experiencing problems and have reported so on Fitbit’s forum. Per user comments, the most Google has done is offer discounts or, if the device was within its warranty period, a replacement.
“This is called planned obsolescence. I’ll be upgrading to a watch style tracker from a different company. I wish Fitbit hadn’t sold out to Google,” a forum user going by Sean77024 wrote on Fitbit’s support forum yesterday.
Others, like 2MeFamilyFlyer, have also accused Fitbit of planning Charge 5 obsolescence. 2MeFamilyFlyer said they’re seeking a Fitbit alternative.
The ongoing problems with the Charge 5, which was succeeded by the Charge 6 on October 12, has some, like reneeshawgo on Fitbit’s forum and PC World Senior Editor Alaina Yee saying that Fitbit devices aren’t meant to last long. In January, Yee wrote: “You should see Fitbits as a 1-year purchase in the US and two years in regions with better warranty protections.”
For many, a year or two wouldn’t be sufficient, even if the Fitbit came with trendy AI features.
