4.6 • 13.2K Ratings
🗓️ 25 January 2024
⏱️ 41 minutes
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Before Apple and Samsung took over our wrists, there was Fitbit. The fitness tracker was just about the coolest thing in Silicon Valley, and everyone in tech was wearing one — including Wired Magazine senior editor Michael Calore and senior writer Lauren Goode!
Long before the pair started hosting the Wired Gadget Lab podcast, they were crushing their steps goal while reporting on the buzziest wearable on the market. Michael and Lauren join David to help trace the steps that Fitbit took to become one of the most enduring pioneers of the wearable world, walking 10,000 steps so that the Apple Watch could run...and answer calls...and text.
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0:28.3 | brands, the innovators, and the early adopters that sometimes get forgotten in the Wall Street whack-a-mole of big business. |
0:35.2 | And today we're bringing you a wearable tech company that once upon a time was inescapable. |
0:43.0 | Fitbit was a pioneer in the development of health monitors and smart watches, |
0:47.0 | but was lapped many times over by the now iconic Apple Watch. |
0:52.0 | The hype may have fizzled but without Fitbit the |
0:55.0 | winners of the wearable market may never have achieved the enormous success that |
0:59.0 | immortalized them in our culture and as we gear up for our season on Apple versus Samsung in the battle over smart watches, |
1:06.1 | we have to go back to the early years of the industry. |
1:09.3 | These days it seems like everybody in their dog has a smart watch of some kind tracking steps and |
1:13.7 | workouts while also fielding calls and texts but before Apple and Samsung took |
1:19.2 | over our wrists there was Fitbit soon that small clip-on became a slide-on, a wristband, that is. |
1:27.0 | Later, Fit-bit morphed into what we know today, |
1:30.0 | an affordable device for monitoring a slew of wellness markers. |
1:34.0 | And without Fitbit's innovations in health tracking, |
1:37.0 | well, the major tech companies like Apple and Samsung |
1:40.0 | would have been looking at a very different landscape or perhaps never entered into it. |
1:46.5 | There's a rich history here. |
1:48.3 | So to walk us through it, we called up a couple of Fitbit OGs. |
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