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Comment by rpdillon | Hacker News Reader

This is sort of an old-man-yells-at-clouds comment, but I recently realized that most of the new stuff companies sell is pretty much a solution in search of a problem. Apple's whole announcement this past week was like this, but I'm feeling the same way about smartwatches, smart homes, and the like lately as well.

For most folks, I feel like spending 20 minutes a day on Darebee would be more effective than their $20/month subscription to their $600 smartwatch.

https://darebee.com/

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Why does everything on this website have to be a bait-and-switch funnel to some kind of (self-)Promotion.

Not every link is an ad.

Darebee's a non-profit that's been around 15 years, and the founder of it intentionally changed its name to not be her identity because her mission is the fitness of real people.

My observation of people that are spending $600 on a special fitness watch and then a $20 month subscription to sync all of their health data and manage it with colorful graphs is they're not in better shape than the people that simply work out.

It's seems like the fitness equivalent of productivity porn.

I suspect you’re right. I asked my doctor if I should get a blood glucose monitor to track my blood sugar. I am not diabetic. She said “you can, but it’s not going to change the advice about what to do.” Basically, you don’t need a CGM to tell you to eat more whole food

Tell me, what part of your workout program you're pitching can inform me how much I weigh? How about my body fat percentage? Can it tell me my heart rate?

Darebee's a fitness nonprofit. I'm not pitching it. I just think it's the straightest line between zero and working out.

You don't have to know how much you weigh and you don't have to know your body fat percentage or even your heart rate to be effective at fitness. You don't need to buy equipment or have a special place to do it.

My point is the barrier to being fit is almost zero if you don't get distracted by all the shiny products they're selling.

This is intended to be an observation that applies to a general audience. I'm aware of elite athletes that require significantly more guidance to achieve the levels of performance they're looking for and I'm not trying to speak to any of that.

Right, and people looking to have a scale that can track their weight over the long term and graph and look at trends is looking for the exact same market product as a workout plan.

It's like walking into the apple store and asking to buy an iphone and some guy coming up to you and telling you what you really need is a copy of the book "How to Win Friends and Influence People"

My impression is that folks that buy smartwatches for workout tracking care about their fitness, and that all the metrics collected (steps taken, heart-rate in-the-zone, etc.) will use those metrics to tune a workout plan.

I was trying to point out that, for those folks, you can skip the middle step and just adopt a real workout plan created by fitness experts, and tested in real classes.

If your point is that there are a bunch of use cases for a fitness tracker/smartwatch that are not that, it's an interesting discussion to have, since my original comment made the assumption that the majority of customers focusing on those features were in fact using them to inform a workout plan/fitness plan (could be limited to diet, which Darebee also tries to address:

    * https://darebee.com/fitness/guide-to-meal-prep.html
    * https://darebee.com/fitness/portion-sizes-explained.html

It's a really fantastic resource that doesn't ask for anything, so I thought it was worth mentioning in a thread about paying $99/year for Apple Health syncing.

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