loading . . . Thoughts on Tech News of Note - 05-08-2026 * **Google's Whoop Competitor**
* **GameStop Attempts to Buy eBay**
* **Anthropic and SpaceX Shack Up**
**Google's Whoop Competitor**
The Whoop band is infamous in certain fitness circles. It grew in popularity among professional and recreational athletes, especially those involved in CrossFit and other power activities. It was famous for its strain score, which is a way of tracking exercise effort to help inform recovery and readiness for the next workout. It tracks data points such as heart rate, sleep, temperature, and movement to create a comprehensive view of one's cardiovascular fitness. The band itself is a relatively simple affair that consists of a pod with all the sensors and a strap that you wear to keep the sensors attached to your skin. Although it started as a simple screenless band, Whoop now has a whole ecosystem of products that allow you to wear it on various places of your body. You can even place the pod in underwear or workout clothing. The information that it provides is catered more toward serious exercisers; people who have fitness goals they want to meet and want data to help support whether they are on track or not. And due to its recurring subscription price, one does need to be rather serious about the tracking it provides to put up the cash. The band itself isn't bought as much as it is leased; the monthly or yearly subscription price includes the cost of the band, and you upgrade the band as new ones come out. Subscription prices start at $199/year and go all the way up to $359/year. I became aware of Whoop several years ago and I thought the app provided just the type of data I was looking for but I wasn't willing to pay what I felt was an exorbitant subscription price, even if the device was a part of it. I defaulted to the Oura ring for a few years and have since then lived in the Google/Fitbit, Garmin, and Samsung ecosystems.
Google acquired Fitbit in 2021, but they have been paying more attention to it recently. The Fitbit app has a new version that has been in public preview for several months, and it is a great improvement over the previous app in almost every way, especially now that they have brought in almost all of the features that weren't originally included such as women's menstrual tracking. The biggest change is the advent of the Coach feature, which allows you to basically chat with Gemini within the Fitbit app and get advice about training, nutrition, sleep, and recovery. I didn't think I would use the Coach very much, but once I found that it retained information I gave it, such as my travel schedule or what supplements I'm trying, I realized it could perhaps be useful. Fitbit Coach knows when I started taking glycine at night and can track whether there have been any changes in my sleep as a result. I told the Coach I was training one leg at a time so that I wouldn't have to hold such heavy weights in my hands and it created a single-leg workout for me. I told it that I sometimes wear weighted vests when I work out and now it gives me tips as to when maybe I should push for the heavier vest or just put them both away for the day and give my body time to recuperate from previous pushes. I've found that even with the limited information I've given it that its suggestions and summaries are now more useful than what I get from Garmin or Samsung and it has become my go-to app when I'm considering how hard to push my body each day.
But it has become tedious to wear two watches (plus one or two rings) and I've been thinking lately of moving to a screenless band I can wear on my upper arm and go back to wearing just one smartwatch at a time. I've also grown weary of constantly charging devices and screenless bands usually have several days of battery life instead of just one or two. I hadn't settled on which band I wanted to try but when I heard that Google was planning to release a Whoop competitor, I was instantly interested because it's already my ecosystem of choice. And this week Google made it official and released the details on the new Fitbit Air. I'm surprised that they kept the Fitbit name, especially since they are removing Fitbit from the name of the app, but perhaps they know that name still has some cachet among fitness enthusiasts, or maybe it's because it's just a band a not a watch. Either way, it's a slim band with no screen just as we expected and it can be used without a subscription to gain insights on sleep and recovery. But to get advanced features like the Coach, you'll need to pay for a subscription. However, Google's plan cost is lower than Whoop: yearly pricing starts at $99 and the band itself starts at $99. This means that the initial outlay can be as low as $198 and $99 per year thereafter. Even if you opt for the special Stephen Curry edition, your first year is $228, which is still competitive with the base Whoop subscription, especially when you remember subsequent years are still $99. You won't need to pay more until/unless you choose to upgrade the band whenever a new one comes out. It remains to be seen if band pricing over time increases and the costs average out to be very similar over a multi-year horizon, but right now it seems as if Google is the value play here. The band isn't out yet and no reviewers have had any experience with it, so it remains to be seen whether this will really be a good alternative to Whoop or other similar screenless straps, but Fitbit/Pixel Watch hardware has been steadily improving over the past few years, so I'm optimistic it will be a solid option for people looking for more fitness data presented to them in an understandable and actionable way at costs that are more accessible to more people.
I pre-ordered it, so expect to hear more about it on my website (www.jpwhiteside.com) or on my on YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@jpwhiteside).
**GameStop Attempts to Buy eBay**
Not that I was looking, but I certainly did not see this story coming. Now, some will argue it's not even really a tech story. One tech angle is that a brick-and-mortar store is looking to move to digital, where the tech platform is everything. Another tech angle, and this one is the more interesting one to me, is leveraging GameStop's stores to move tech-centered merchandise for eBay. Both GameStop and eBay are popular sources for buying used and new devices, and the idea of having more local options to get tech is appealing. I currently buy most of my tech from Amazon or Best Buy, but I'd certainly welcome another option. However, I have to admit that when I first saw this story brewing over the weekend, I thought it was somewhat preposterous. After all, eBay is much bigger than GameStop and while GameStop is doing better now than in some recent years, it seems it still has a long way to go to prove that it can continue to be a sustainable business well into the future.
But the key idea here is somewhat interesting and reminds me a lot of Amazon's marketplace approach where sellers can fulfill orders directly or stock inventory at Amazon locations for faster and easier shipping to customers. The key difference here is the ability to walk into a store and pick up something you bought from eBay, or to perhaps someday even buy something at GameStop that is listed on eBay. This is an opportunity for the two companies to compete with Amazon on a front that Amazon currently can't match. Amazon doesn't have anything like this on the sales end, just the ability to return some products at Kohl's stores. This could be a boon to both companies if implemented well.
Yet there really isn't anything about this ploy that seems certain. GameStop will need extensive financing to complete the acquisition and there doesn't seem to be consensus that this will be an easy feat. They'll also need eBay leadership to agree the deal makes sense, or appeal directly to stockholders if they need to take the next step of attempting a hostile takeover. There are high hurdles here for sure. In the meantime, the potential impact to online sales seems significant and worth paying attention to.
**Anthropic and SpaceX Shack Up**
Anthropic has entered into an agreement with SpaceX to use all of the available computing capacity at their Memphis data center, Colossus 1. This will give Anthropic more than 300 megawatts of computing power, which is supposedly the equivalent of more than 220K NVIDIA GPUs. This additional capacity will allow Anthropic to raise its daily usage limits for Claude Code and its API for developers wanting to leverage Claude directly. Anthropic also expects to increase limits for subscribers to its Pro and Max plans. As computing constraints have been a big issue for Anthropic recently, this seems to be a big win for both companies; SpaceX gets an opportunity to monetize its unused data center capacity and Anthropic can quiet some of the noise around the availability of its most popular products.
The news is noteworthy because of the size of the additional capacity - data centers are considered hyperscale at 100 megawatts - but also because of the personalities behind the deal. Although everyone seems to acknowledge that SpaceX is run by President Gwynne Shotwell, Elon is the big name everyone associates with it, and he hasn't necessarily been buddy-buddy with Anthropic's Dario Amodei. Yet, with the current feud playing out in court between Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk, this may just be another instance of the-enemy-of-enemy-is-my-friend plot twist being played out before us. This may be another shot in the arm for Anthropic's business-to-business profitability and might help propel them forward in their quest to be the go-to AI company for enterprises and other large customers, to OpenAI's detriment.
It's important to note that Colossus 1 has a sketchy environmental record. The center uses gas turbines that emit methane and lead to smog. It also uses more than 5 million gallons of water a day. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it sits near an economically depressed area of Memphis (that with the latest Tennessee gerrymandering ploy will likely have no real representation in Congress) that is heavily populated by people of color that already faced environmental challenges even before the data center was constructed. There are concerns about the data center's impact on the electrical grid as well, and these concerns will surely ramp up once the center is running at full capacity. So although it's good for Anthropic that they get the additional capacity and good for SpaceX that they can monetize its use, the impact on the community continues on a downward trajectory with no positive end in sight. This seems to be the current story of AI: a bit of good for some wrapped up in a whole lot of bad for many. https://www.jpwhiteside.com/thoughts-on-tech-news-of-note-05-08-2026/
