Tech Tidbits: Apple Fitness+ Extended Content, and Amazfit Active Max Hands-On

In the New Year, sports technology companies are trying to get ahead of CES next week, with their announcements. While I don’t expect much to be notable in the gaming hardware space next week at CES, I expect we’ll see a variety of software updates. In general, CES has lost prominence in the technology/sports fitness industry in the last 5 years (from a peak in 2018 or so), as companies increasingly realize that presenting products at CES often results in low visibility and depth of content, because there are so many things being presented that many new products are buried in the news of one section.

In any case, with CES next week, let’s talk about these issues first.

Apple Fitness+ Reviews:

Apple has announced a drop in Apple Fitness + updates, as they often do this time of year. Everything below is available as of Monday, January 5, unless otherwise noted.

Adds 4 multi-week workout plans:
– “Get Your Fitness Back”: Includes HIIT, Strength, and Yoga, with three workouts per week of each type, 10 minutes long per type.
– “Build a Yoga Habit in 4 Weeks”: Two 10-minute workouts per week, one slow and one vigorous, designed to complement your existing workout routine
– “Back Strength and HIIT”: Three workouts a week of 20 minutes each, split into 10 minutes each of Strength and HIIT.
– “Strength Basics in 3 Weeks”: Three workouts a week, each focusing on a different area of ​​the body, and aimed at establishing proper technique. Note, this one is available from January 12.

Adding a New Artist Highlight: They are five new workouts from KAROL G, and then on February 2nd, there will be three new workouts from Bad Bunny.

New season episodes: These include Penn Badgley, Mel B, and Michelle Monahan (later in her year).

New Visitors to Training in 2026: With Fitness+ workouts, there will be new workouts featuring social media stars featured in other workouts, including Allie Bennett (Treadmill), TwinSauce (Dance), and Remy Park (Yoga)

In addition, they released some data from the Apple Watch study involving 100,000 participants from 2021 to early 2025. That study showed that Apple Watch users tend to keep their streaks longer than the so-called landmark ‘stop day’, which is Friday 2 January, when people stop eating ice cream, and go back to eating ice cream in full. Below, you can see the spike that occurs in January, after the holidays.

Specifically, Apple said:

“During the first two weeks of January, more than 60 percent of Apple Watch users increased their daily exercise minutes by more than 10 percent from the December average.

Notably, many Apple Watch users maintain those exercise levels on Quitter Day and in the months that follow. About 80 percent of those who increased their minutes of exercise maintained those increased levels of exercise during the second half of January, and 90 percent of that group also maintained higher levels in February and March.”

Speaking of which, if you close all three rings for 7 days in a row in January, there is a new ‘Ring in the New Year’ prize.

Meanwhile, and perhaps of most interest to people on this site, will be iOS 26.3, which will likely be released to public availability later in the month. That should allow third-party smartwatches to start receiving actionable smart notifications. So far, that has been limited to simply dismissing the notification, but not responding to it (eg, replying to a text message). Of course, while companies like Garmin and others have been able to access this in beta for a while, it remains to be seen how they expand to get support for this feature, which has spread to the community. In addition, at the moment, this notification forwarding as described has a significant disadvantage for sports technology reviewers: You cannot receive notifications on more than one device at a time (today, all devices receive a notification).

Quick thoughts on Amazfit Active Max:

Amazfit announced the new $169 Amazfit Active Max a few days ago, although due to some delays, my unit spent about a week enjoying the holidays in Barcelona. Anyway, it’s here now, and I’ve started testing it. The most important details are:

– 1.5” AMOLED Display @ 3,000 nits (same brightness as Apple Watch Ultra 3)
– Offline map
– Claimed 25 days of battery life (10 days with always-on display, and 64 hours with GPS)
– 39.5g (including band) with 5ATM water resistance
– Includes voice control bits
– About 170 sports profiles
– 4GB storage for offline podcasts/MP3s/etc.
– Technically it 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 taking the Active 2 watch, and making it bigger (in every way).

This appears to be a very compelling offering from Amazfit. As I have noted in the past, like COROS, Amazfit does very well when it focuses on the budget segment. Although (like COROS), when they try to scale up, the value prop tends to collapse. In this case, the most attractive feature of the Active Max for outsiders is that it has an offline map and about 170 sports profiles that Amazfit has (although most of them are classified, there are different sports/metrics detection features). However, if you need to track Chess, Tug-of-War, and Bucking, it’s there for you. Note that the Amazfit Active 2 also has maps, and is about $100 (or, with a smaller screen, less battery life, etc…). Note, I will not be able to test the Snow Shoveling sports mode.

The screen here is large and comprehensive. It’s a great contrast to the COROS Pace 3, for example, which saw its price recently dropped to $199.

Interestingly, the attachment posts of the watch band actually rotate with the band, which is interesting. I’m not sure if I have any ideas one way or the other, but it caught my attention​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

As for COROS Pace 3 vs Amazfit Active Max, I can make a little comparison between the two. Obviously, the Amazfit Active Max is cheaper and on paper it seems to be a better deal if you want AMOLED, but I will investigate what is the real world difference when it comes to runners/cyclists/etc… In general, with Amazfit, there are usually tons of features per sheet, but they are also often very limited in use. In some cases, that’s perfectly fine, and in others (eg, offline maps to reroute), that’s not so good.

Still, I’d love to see Amazfit push the boundaries here on what’s possible, be it in hardware or software. I’ll check back in a week or two with some serious thoughts on it.

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With that – thanks for reading!

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