With the New Year, sports tech companies are trying to get ahead of CES next week, with their announcements. While I don’t expect much notable in the endurance sports hardware realm next week at CES, I do expect we’ll see various software updates. Generally speaking, CES has lost prominence in the sports tech/fitness industry over the last 5 years (from a huge peak in 2018 or so), as companies largely realize that launching products at CES mostly just results in lower views and content depth, because there’s so many things being launched that most new products get buried in the avalanche of one-paragraph news stories.
In any event, with CES next week, let’s talk about these tidbits first.
Apple Fitness+ Updates:
Apple has announced a smattering of Apples Fitness+ updates, as they usually do around this time of year. Everything below is available as of Monday, January 5th, unless noted otherwise.
Adding 4 new multi-week workout programs:
— “Make your Fitness Comeback”: Includes HIIT, Strength, and Yoga, with three workouts per week each type, at 10 minutes long per type.
— “Build a Yoga Habit in 4 Weeks”: Two workouts of 10-minutes each per week, one slow and one energetic, where they are designed to pair up to your existing workouts
— “Back-to-Back Strength and HIIT”: Three workouts per week of 20 minutes each, split into 10-minutes each of Strength and HIIT.
— “The Strength Basics in 3 weeks”: Three workouts per week, each focused on. Different body area, and aiming to establish correct technique. Note this one is available from January 12th.
Adding New Artist Spotlight: There’s five new workouts from KAROL G, and then then on February 2nd, there will be three new workouts from Bad Bunny.
New Time to Walk Episodes: These include Penn Badgley, Mel B, and Michelle Monahan (later in the year for her).
New Guests in Workouts in 2026: For Fitness+ workouts, there will be new workouts with social media stars included in some workouts, including Allie Bennett (Treadmill), TwinSauce (Dance), and Remy Park (Yoga)
In addition, they released some data from an Apple Watch study involving 100,000 participants from 2021 to early 2025. That study showed that Apple Watch users tend to keep up their streaks longer than the so-called ‘quitters day’ milestone, which is the 2nd Friday in January, when people give up on New Year’s resolutions and go back to eating ice cream (to be clear, I fully support eating ice cream). Below, you can see the spike occurring in January, after the holidays.
Specifically, Apple stated:
“During the first two weeks of January, over 60 percent of Apple Watch users increased their daily exercise minutes by over 10 percent from their December average.
Notably, many Apple Watch users kept up those exercise levels through Quitter’s Day and into the following months. Nearly 80 percent of those who increased their exercise minutes maintained those increased exercise levels through the second half of January, with 90 percent of that group also maintaining elevated levels through February and March.”
Speaking of which, if you close all three rings 7-days in a row in January, there’s a new ‘Ring in the New Year’ reward.
Meanwhile, and perhaps most interesting to folks of this site, will be iOS 26.3, likely releasing to public availability later in the month. That should allow 3rd party smartwatches to start to receive actionable smart notifications. Up until now that’s been limited to simply dismissing a notification, but not responding to it (e.g. responding to a text message). Of course, while companies like Garmin and others have had access to this in beta for a bit, it remains to be seen how they expand for support for this feature, which rolled out to the public. Further, at present this notification forwarding as described does have a notable downside for sports tech reviewers: You can’t receive notifications on more than one device at a time (today, all devices get a notification).
Amazfit Active Max Quick Thoughts:
Amazfit announced the new $169 Amazfit Active Max a few days ago, though due to some customs delays, my unit spent about a week enjoying the holidays in Barcelona. Nonetheless, it has now arrive,d and I’ve started testing it out. The most notable specs are:
– 1.5” AMOLED Display @ 3,000 nits (the same brightness as an Apple Watch Ultra 3)
– Offline mapping
– Claimed 25 days of battery life (10 days with always-on display, and 64hrs GPS)
– 39.5g (including band) with 5ATM water resistance
– Includes voice control bits
– About 170 sport profiles
– 4GB of storage for offline podcasts/MP3’s/etc…
– Technically has NFC for payments (but in practice, that only works with Curve accounts in Europe)
If you’re familiar with the Amazfit Active line, this is essentially taking the Active 2 watch, and making it bigger (in all the ways).
This seems like a super compelling offering from Amazfit. As I’ve noted in the past, much like COROS, Amazfit does best when they focus on the budget segment. Whereas (like COROS), when they try and go upscale, the value prop tends to fall apart. In this case, the most appealing aspect of the Active Max for outdoors folks is that it’s got offline mapping and the approximately 170 sport profiles that Amazfit has (though, most of these are just categorization, rather than unique sport detection/metrics features). Still, if you need to track Chess, Tug-of-War, and Bucking, it’s there for you. Note that the Amazfit Active 2 also had maps, and it’s about $100 (though, with a smaller screen, smaller battery life, etc…). Note, I will likely be unable to test the Snow Shoveling sport mode.
The screen here is definitely large and in charge. A pretty significant contrast to the COROS Pace 3, for example, which saw its price recently reduced to $199.
Interestingly, the watch band attachment poles actually rotate with the strap, which is kinda interesting. I’m undecided if I have any opinions on that one way or the other, but it caught my attention since I can’t remember the last time (if ever) I saw the watch poles themselves move.
As for the COROS Pace 3 vs Amazfit Active Max, I might do a bit of a comparison between the two. Obviously, the Amazfit Active Max is cheaper and on paper seems like the better deal if you want AMOLED, but I’ll do some poking around into what the real-world differences are when it comes to runners/cyclists/etc… For example, COROS has more buttons that might make it better, especially in winter usage. Generally speaking, with Amazfit, there tends to be tons of features per the spec sheet, but they also tend to be super thin in implementation. For some scenarios, that’s totally fine, whereas for others (e.g. offline maps re-routing), that’s not so fine.
Still, I like seeing Amazfit push the boundaries here on what’s possible here, either via hardware or software. I’ll circle back in a week or two with a bit more in-depth thoughts on it.
—
With that – thanks for reading!
FOUND THIS POST USEFUL? SUPPORT THE SITE!
Hopefully, you found this post useful. The website is really a labor of love, so please consider becoming a DC RAINMAKER Supporter. This gets you an ad-free experience, and access to our (mostly) bi-monthly behind-the-scenes video series of “Shed Talkin’”.
Support DCRainMaker - Shop on Amazon
Otherwise, perhaps consider using the below link if shopping on Amazon. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but your purchases help support this website a lot. It could simply be buying toilet paper, or this pizza oven we use and love.
Newsletter