Friday Fun Facts – Wahoo, Polar & Apple

Today, more sports wearable excitement is added to the perhaps more interesting news from yesterday.

Interesting News Stories – Garmin, Coros, Peloton & More

Let’s start today with Polar

Polar added a new Sleep feature called SLEEPWISE when the Ignite 3 was launched a few months ago.

the Polar Ignite 3 Review | fitness | one of the best got better

Having already been sneaked onto Pacer, Pacer Pro, Grit X Pro and Vantage V2 in December, Sleepwise now finds its way onto the rest of Polar’s current models namely Grit X, Ignite 2, Polar Flow app, and Vantage M2. That’s to be expected as Polar aims to offer 5 years of product support.

Sleepwise, however, is not the most spectacular of features. It kinda interestingly forecasts your readiness during the day ahead as well as offers a degree of sleep coaching.

Polar SleepWise feature utilizes sleep tracking and biomathematical modelling for predicting daytime alertness based on how one has slept recently. To predict how sleep boosts one’s alertness, the Polar model evaluates sleep amount, quality, and timing against personal sleep need and one’s body’s internal circadian rhythm. The model predicts one’s boost levels hour-by-hour, daily boost score, sleep gate, and sleep window. A sleep gate marks the start of one’s sleep window – the time when one’s body would naturally want to be asleep. It takes from 1 to 2 weeks for SleepWise to collect enough data to reach full reliability.

…the models differ, the models typically consider time awake, sleep-wake history, and the circadian rhythm. The outputs of the models have typically been validated against a psychomotor vigilance task after modest or severe sleep restrictions. The psychomotor vigilance task is a simple task where one presses a button as soon as the light appears on a screen. Results from such a task correlate with maintaining attention, problem-solving, and decision-making.

#Shrug.

Apple Sales Fall

Apple sales have fallen as the Company starts to regret its reliance on China for manufacturing. It seems to have escaped the notice of Apple’s management that the West has just started Cold War II with China. In my naive view of the world, I would have thought it unwise to rely on your ‘enemy’ (the CCP) for anything. Oh well, de-globalisation here we come.

Of interest to readers of this blog: the UK’s Financial Times reports that Apple’s Wearables Division experienced an 8.3% fall in sales to a mere $13.5bn. That division includes Apple Watch but we can’t conclude that the launch of Watch 8/Ultra was a failure as other products like AirPods are included too. However, I’d imagine that Ultra sales were mildly underwhelming for the company with pressures hitting both the supply and demand sides for the product – heck, I was even surprised that quite a lot of reviewers were lukewarm on the Ultra rather than their usual pro-Apple, ebullient selves.

…nearly two-thirds of the customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the last quarter were buying one for the first time. This comes after Apple introduced three new Apple Watch models last year: Apple Watch Series 8, Apple Watch Ultra, and the more affordable second-generation Apple Watch SE. [Tim Cook, via 9to5mac]

Wahoo links to Trailforks

BREAKING: Another watch/bike company links to another platform.

I’m not sure this sort of thing is news any more but there are no new launches today so if you want to read more about it head on over to dcrainmaker’s site (link to: Trailforks Article).

In a nutshell, Wahoo ELEMNT now shows Trailfork’s routes just as it would for Strava and RwGPS. Trailforks’ routes tend to be more trail-focused than road-focused, you got that from the name I guess?

More: here from Wahoo