Tech Jobs: Apple Lays Off Fitness+ Team, Plans More Changes Ahead

Apple has trimmed staff at Fitness+, its subscription workout platform, in what is being reported as an early sign of more significant changes to come for the service. The cuts, reported in Gurman's "Power On" newsletter, follow his earlier reporting this year that Apple was already reassessing the platform's future.

Who was affected at Fitness+?

According to Gurman, the layoffs this past week hit a handful of employees working specifically on Fitness+'s audio offerings, the team behind sessions like Time to Walk and Time to Run, which subscribers can stream from an Apple Watch without needing to watch video. Gurman reports that while new audio episodes will now be released less frequently, the formats aren't being discontinued outright, at least for now.

Gurman attributes the cuts to a familiar set of pressures: the platform's substantial running costs, the constant need for fresh content, and ongoing subscriber churn. He writes that Fitness+, Apple's answer to Peloton's content library, has become an easy target for savings given those dynamics, and that this round of layoffs marks the start of that process rather than the end of it.

The service is currently overseen jointly by Apple's services chief Eddy Cue and health leader Sumbul Desai, a structure Gurman has flagged before as relevant context for the platform's direction.

What comes next?

Gurman reports that people within the Fitness+ organisation widely view this round of cuts as the opening move in a larger wave of cost reduction and structural change expected over the coming months and years, rather than a one-off adjustment.

Looking further ahead, Gurman speculates that Apple may ultimately fold Fitness+ into its overhauled Health app, pointing to the fact that both now sit under the same leadership umbrella as a signal of where things could be headed. He notes that Apple is already building instructional video clips into the upcoming Health app redesign to explain health metrics and benchmarks, a feature he suggests could dovetail with Fitness+ content down the line.