Apple’s wearable empire is showing cracks. Eleven years after the Apple Watch debuted and went on to generate an estimated $100 billion in lifetime sales, the product that defined the smartwatch category is now facing its most serious challenge yet — from the very industry it helped create.
A Leadership Vacuum at the Worst Time
The warning signs are hard to ignore. Former Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams, long considered the driving force behind Apple Watch, retired last year. Jay Blahnik, who led the company’s Fitness+ service, is departing amid litigation. Health marketing chief Stan Ng has also retired. Meanwhile, Apple has been steadily losing engineering and health talent to competitors, further weakening its position at a critical inflection point for the wearables market.
Making matters more striking, Apple executive Eddy Cue has reportedly been using Whoop and Oura — two of Apple’s most direct competitors — for his own health tracking needs. Cue has reportedly pushed for broader internal changes, but Apple’s ambitious AI health coaching project, known internally as Mulberry, was recently scaled back.
Screenless Rivals Are Setting the Pace
Whoop and Oura have built multibillion-dollar businesses around a fundamentally different premise: no screen, just AI-powered health insights delivered through sleek, minimal hardware. It is precisely the kind of forward-thinking innovation that Apple’s Health app has so far struggled to match. As Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman put it, a screenless band or ring is something Apple should be pioneering, not racing to copy.
With Tim Cook stepping down in September, incoming CEO John Ternus will inherit the challenge of deciding whether Apple can still lead a category it once dominated — or whether the next chapter of wearables will be written by someone else.