Issue No. 92: Will Apple Acquire Peloton?

"Peloton’s quest to become the Apple of fitness hamstrung the brand. Forgoing vertical integration, new content/software/hardware bundles are emerging. Whether Peloton pursues FaaS or not, open ecosystems will continue to gain traction."

Peloton is now a $32B company. Today's @ScreenshotEssay explores their future. Is Peloton the Roku of Fitness, the Netflix of Fitness, or Neither? https://screenshotessays.com/peloton

-Peloton is overly reliant on hardware success.

Instead of making all the hardware, Apple wants to create the OS for health, and own the critical chokepoint that all players must integrate with in order to get distribution. This feels like a distinctly Tim Cook contribution, a definite break from the past.

Sure, they have the watch, which measures your heart rate. But they’re leaving the majority of the possible device space to others, such as Peloton, WHOOP, and Eight Sleep. Apple doesn't want to go down the path of making health-related hardware devices. These have high fixed R&D and manufacturing costs to make them, and each device tends to only f... See more

Now, I understand that today Apple is doing just fine by selling expensive phones to affluent people. But just imagine what would happen at the next Apple keynote if Tim Cook announced a simple monthly Apple subscription plan that covered everything: network provider charges, automatic hardware upgrades, and add-on options for extra devices, music

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Strategically, accepting “good enough” in both of these areas makes sense, because neither applications nor sensors are unique strengths for Apple to the same extent as their ability to integrate healthcare data. And as we mentioned before, niche health devices can be challenging businesses, requiring high of R&D and manufacturing fixed costs, but ... See more