Peloton Shares Crash 23% – Will Apple Finally Swoop In?
Peloton‘s Q2 results dropped yesterday and, well, they’re not great. On the news, the company’s share price tanked around 23% to an 18-month low. Once again this will raise the spectre of a Peloton acquisition by Apple, Garmin, or some over-confident VCs.
What Happened?
The headline numbers are brutal. Revenue for Q2 came in at $656.5 million versus the $674 million analysts expected. tip: Never underachieve on analysts expectations. Even worse, Peloton’s forward guidance for Q3 is significantly lower at $605-625 million.
Behind the share price woes, membership on Peloton’s subscription platform fell more than 6% year-over-year to 5.8 million. That’s a significant chunk of users walking away from their bikes and treadmills.
CEO Peter Stern, who took the helm relatively recently, has been trying to turn things around with cost cuts – including laying off 11% of the workforce in January and raising prices on both equipment and subscriptions. It doesn’t seem to be working yet.
Then there are further departures with CFO Liz Coddington leaving. She’ll stick around through March while they find a replacement.
The Apple Question (Again)
Regular readers will know I’ve banged on about this before. Apple acquiring Peloton makes strategic sense – Fitness+ is reportedly struggling with high churn and offers little revenue upside. Peloton would bring hardware, an established subscription base, and those excellent instructors.
But, in the absence of other serious buyers, it must be in Apple’s interest to wait for Peloton’s situation to deteriorate further and lower its value. Yesterday’s 23% drop certainly helps with that strategy.
Garmin remains an outside possibility, too, though the subscription model and lifestyle content creation differs significantly from Garmin’s focus on sensors and outdoor sports. The fit isn’t quite as natural, but there is complementarity.
My Take
The home fitness bubble has well and truly popped. Consumer confidence is at an 11-year low, prices are stubbornly high, and people are going back to actual gyms. Me included. Peloton’s core problem isn’t execution – it’s that the pandemic-era demand simply isn’t coming back.
If you’re a Peloton owner, don’t panic. The service isn’t going anywhere immediately, and the hardware is still decent. But if you’re considering buying one… maybe hold off and see how this plays out. There might be some bargains ahead, one way or another.
Source: Reuters, Google Finance
Last Updated on 6 February 2026 by the5krunner
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tfk is the founder and author of the5krunner, an independent endurance sports technology publication. With 20 years of hands-on testing of GPS watches and wearables, and competing in triathlons at an international age-group level, tfk provides in-depth expert analysis of fitness technology for serious athletes and endurance sport competitors.
There’s a lot of problems with a Peloton acquisition by Apple. We can consider things from multiple points of view: hardware, software, and services.
On the hardware front, Peloton bikes/treads/row all use Android systems. Apple of course has their own iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, etc. for their devices. Why would Apple want to take over all these machines when they could just make their own machines, attach a large tablet running a variant of iPad OS and control the whole thing? This would be like if they had bought Garmin or Polar to get a watch rather than making their own Apple Watch. Even the Peloton Guide isn’t of much use to Apple; the last tvOS update gave support for continuity camera so people can bring connect their iPhones to their Apple TV and use the phone’s camera in apps like FaceTime and Zoom. Apple would leverage this system to get their own rep tracking in Apple Fitness+ rather than rely on getting an additional camera taking up an HDMI port that could go to Apple TV.
On the software front, there’s the existing Fitness+ apps on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV, that already have integration with the Apple Watch and show the activity rings on screen. The last update added support for Stacks and Custom Plans. Acquiring Peloton means there’s now two distinct apps doing the same thing. If Apple wanted Peloton for their app then they would have likely acquired it before developing and launching Fitness+ in 2020.
On the services front, Fitness+ fits inside Apple’s overall Apple One initiative combining all their services for $37.95, which gets you Apple Music, Arcade, TV+, News+ and more iCloud storage in addition to Fitness+ — meanwhile, Peloton All Access is $44/month. Does Apple raise the One cost to $50-$75 dollars with a Peloton acquisition? Does Apple just give Peloton users Apple One for free and reduce their prices?
The main thing to note on an Apple/Peloton acquisition is that it is highly unlikely Apple would have both Fitness+ and Peloton at the same time, so one would get folded into the other. Apple has already designed Fitness+ to what they want it to be, and there’s notable differences: no live classes and no leaderboard, for example. Instead, there’s a “burn bar” for cardio activities. It stands to reason Apple would collapse Peloton into Fitness+.
People bring up Beats as an example, but Apple closed the Beats Music service on 30 November 2015 after launching Apple Music on 30 June 2015. Their acquisition of the classical music app Primephonic closed that service on 7 September 2021 and they launched Apple Classical app in March 2023 — almost two years they left people without the service!
The thought they’d buy Peloton and they not touch it at all is ridiculous. From simple things like getting rid of Spotify integration to more complex things like the look of the studio — Fitness+ has a very different look from Peloton studio, so the two don’t mix well in the same catalog — Apple would make tons of changes of it were to happen, and what do they get? They can do fitness hardware if they wish, or buy one of the companies they already use in Fitness+, like Schwinn for cycles, Technogym for treads, or LifeFitness for rowers. They already have the software and the service.
Some of my numbers in my first reply are wrong, oops.
Peloton All Access is now $50/month USD ($49.99, but really) and Apple One Premier is $37.95. Fitness+ alone is $10/month or $80/year That doesn’t change much — it would still be a weird merge of two different styles of pricing. Does Apple raise prices for all of their Fitness+ users? Reduce All Access or just throw it into Premier?
Other recent news, Peloton released “crosstraining” versions of their hardware late last year. Again, Apple will not want to be selling Android tablet based machines. Imagine the outcry of current owners when their machines are end of life in favor of iOS versions, and the support involved. It would simply be easier to roll out new machines on their own. Imagine instead if Apple wanted a gym machine hardware maker, they could buy Wahoo, make a cheaper spin bike version of the Wahoo KICKR Bike, etc. While also selling the current KICKR Bike and Run treadmills, with iPad and GymKit integrations, and not have to worry about Android tablets.
Years ago, many analysts kept expecting Apple to sell a television set, to compete with Sony, LG, etc. And that never happened. Instead, they made the Apple TV box to hook up to any television. Rather than selling gym machines, a better strategy would be for them to expand GymKit, basically using GymKit/Apple Watch as their Apple TV analog. On the services side, we don’t see Apple in the mix to buy Warner Brothers/HBO but instead continue to slowly develop their own catalog. I’m not sure why fitness training and gym machines would differ from their attitude towards television hardware and streaming services.
As a separate reply, who else could consider buying Peloton?
Would Garmin, for example, want to pick it up, make their watches the “hero HRM” for the services, merge it with their TACX service and high end bike? This would give Garmin a service to compete more with Apple.
Would Google, who bought Fitbit in 2021, want to acquire Peloton to hook it to their Pixel watch and grow their fitness line? They already have a partnership: https://www.onepeloton.com/press/articles/google-fitbit-and-peloton-announce-partnership
I’m not sure I’d bet on either of those, but each of them seems at least slightly more plausible than Apple.
i dont doubt what you say.
The subscribers and hardware competency would be good reasons to buy. no company would ever be a perfect fit
Let’s assume Peloton would continue to decline. the companies you cite are reasonable examples but the business models are not as good a fit.
if I had to bet I would bet on VCs buying it out, delisting it and hoping they could reimagine the business to wards a more profitable b2b sale (to apple, but in a modified form to the current one)