The screenless fitness wearable category, popularised and dominated largely by the Boston-HQed Whoop, seems to have ripened enough for Apple to enter. According to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is developing a new fitness tracker, which will be screenless and similar in functionality to Whoop.
The project has support from the top. Former CEO Tim Cook and services chief Eddy Cue have both shown active interest in the device. Cue, who took over supervision of Apple’s health and fitness divisions late last year, has reportedly been vocal internally about Apple needing to move faster in health wearables — specifically citing Whoop and Oura as products that are offering more compelling, useful features than Apple’s current lineup.
The screenless wearable category has moved quickly in 2026. Google launched the Fitbit Air — starting at $99.99 — in May, positioning it as a screen-free health tracker with up to a week of battery life. Garmin followed in July with the CIRQA Smart Band, its first display-free product, offering up to 10 days of battery and health tracking through Garmin Connect. However, Whoop — which essentially built the category — remains dominant and the reference point — with WHOOP 5.0 delivering over 14 days of battery life and a focus on recovery, sleep, and strain metrics without a screen in sight.
Apple’s entry is being seen as a part of company’s accelerated push to diversify its wearables offering. The Vision Pro headset — despite being a technological marvel — hasn’t seen much traction. Apple has spent well over a decade building the Apple Watch into the world’s best-selling smartwatch. It has not, until now, seriously explored what a device without a screen looks like. The Watch remains as commercially strong as ever — sales reportedly grew 21% in Q1 2026 — but the industrial design team has spent roughly the past year exploring different directions: screenless bands, different display shapes, a circular watch concept, and new price tiers above the Ultra and below the SE.
What Apple has not figured out yet is whether this is a product or just an idea that prototyping will kill. That’s what technology investigations are for. Notably, Garmin’s stock fell on the report.