14 New Apple Watch Sports Profiles – all completely ridiculous
The future of fitness tracking for the unwashed masses has arrived and it’s bonkers crazy. OK, it’s great that Apple is recognising even more fitness activities and it’s great that these new sports profiles show that all the truly needed sports have been covered but “Dog Walking” …really? I have a dog. I walk it..again…really?
Breaking News…
The Apple Watch Ultra has introduced 14 new sports profiles that have left me scratching my head with disbelief whilst scrolling through a now infeasibly long list of sports profiles just to find “running”. Running is now located just after “vacuuming,” “cable management,” “changing the duvet,” “unblocking the toilet,” and before “shopping at Ikea,” “waiting for an iPhone delivery,” “walking the dog,” “moving day,” and “computer cable management.” That’s right, folks, it’s time to start tracking your every move, EVERY move, no matter how mundane.
Q: Does this signal Apple’s nefarious intent to secretly release the minutiae of our daily movements and habits to the government?
A: It looks like it.
Let’s start with “vacuuming.” Now, we all know vacuuming can be a strenuous activity, but who knew it could be considered a sport? With the Apple Watch, you can now track your heart rate, steps and vacuuming cadence while sucking up the shoe remnants from yesterday’s run. It’s like a game of “beat the clock,” but instead of scoring points, you’re scoring a cleaner house.
Moving on to “cable management.” With the Apple Watch Ultra, you can now track your every move as you crawl under your desk and wrestle with a tangle of wires. It’s like a game of Twister, but with cables instead of coloured circles. Starting this profile is auto-enabled by default but you can turn it off if you don’t rummage under desks (or sinks?) very much.
And who could forget about “changing the duvet?”. This is perhaps a valid inclusion into the list. It takes me at least 20 minutes to put a duvet on by myself and that’s sometimes longer than I spend on my 60-minute indoor weight workouts (admit it, you slack there too sometimes). Plus with kids and a dog, sheets and duvets definitely need changing more frequently than in my singles days as both kids and dogs are equally as filthy.
But wait, there’s more! How about “unblocking the toilet?” You can now track your every movement as well as your every move (pun intended).
Or “shopping at Ikea?” again this is easily a longer event than a marathon for some people but it’s hardly stressful or strenuous apart from the realisation at checkout that Ikea is nowhere near as cheap as it used to be. To be fair (again) this sports profile is cleverer than it seems as its name changes based on your location. So Apple Watch has expanded the auto-detection of running ovals (US-only) and geo-locates your position to known shopping areas (otherwise known as malls, retail parks, town centres, etc) then changes the sports profile name accordingly! Cool! It also has a battery-saving feature whereby the GPS polling frequency is significantly lowered (Ultra model only) when you are inside a shop. The more privacy-minded amongst you won’t like the fact that Apple will soon be selling your shopping routes and habits to every other organisation that isn’t too bothered about where the tracking data comes from (ie most of them, despite what they say publically)
And let’s not forget “waiting for a Royal Mail/USPS delivery.” Because who wouldn’t want to track their anxiety levels over several weeks as they anxiously wait for the delivery truck to arrive? Actually, this one is super smart as there are now links from EVRI.com, UPS.com, Fedex.com, DHL.com, Royal Mail, USPS and a few others to Apple Health. So these shipping apps automatically trigger a ‘waiting’ event in Apple Health at the point your order is received by them and logs HRV changes for the duration until you sign for it.
But the real gem here is “walking the dog.” I mean what even defines a dog walk? Mine vary from 100 throws of a frisbee in the back garden to a regular 45-minute walk at the local park to a 90-minute run on th ebanks of the Thames whilst being pestered by my 4-legged friend for being WAY too slow. It looks like you can set different types of goals for walking your dog within the ‘Walking the dog’ sports profiles.” that includes dog walk, dog run and cani-cross but excludes Dog+frisbee throwing #NotHappy. I’ll add more here in a week or so when I’ve had time to play with it.
And finally, we have “moving day.” With the Apple Watch, you can now track your every move as you lug boxes and furniture from one location to another. No doubt it’s moving day because your partner has divorced you because you spend WAY more time with your electronic devices than them.
But seriously, with these new sports profiles, Apple is really blurring the line between exercise and everyday activities. I can’t wait for the day when I can track my “Netflix binging” or “scrolling through social media” as a legitimate sport. Hey, anyone can dream, right?
Image Credit BasicAppleGuy.com(#Parody. )
Please go and visit BasicAppleGuy.com, which was the inspiration for this article, he has some interesting Apple-related content with a visual twist.
While I know it is parody, some of those are not actually ridiculous: walking the dog, moving day, shopping…
I cannot be the only person that tracks a walk with the dog or to the shops and lugging my bags of groceries home. It all counts, right? RIGHT?!
Ironically Garmin is much closer to having an infinite list anything remotely like an activity.
it does all count and that’s why there’s 24×7 hr 😉
24×7 HR is not getting me any badges.
I have no idea why people would want to track anything but sports/training. In Garmin Connect I tend to block friends who track their commutes and park walks because among this trash I can’t find those who actually do something meaningful. Still think this article is a joke. People do realize that these watches count their calories and measure HR without tracking an activity?
I mean, do you realize how many points it takes to get to Garmin Level 7?
😱
Pretty long if your using an Apple Watch 😂
Ridiculous profiles, but by the description they are doing a lot of programing to track specific metrics for each one. I mean, by the story it looks like they are not just renamed generic profiles. Is it true?
In the meantime, years have passed and Garmin can’t include stroke count to Kayak profile, giving customers just a renamed generic profile.