Why I wouldn’t invest in consumer health hardware
(Ceci n’est pas investment advice.)
Yesterday’s post on Apple’s health strategy solidified a suspicion I’ve been harboring for awhile, which is that the future is going to be rough for connected health and fitness devices — Peloton, Eight Sleep, Withings, Mirror, WHOOP, etc.
To be clear, this could take a long time, and connected health devices could be great businesses in the meantime. But I think the long term is bleak.
Here’s why:
Somebody, most likely Apple, is going to build the OS of health data, and once they do, the health device makers will have no choice but to integrate with it. This will modularize them, the same way Facebook and Google modularized publishers.
