For those who have just joined this summer series, a brief post-mortem is in order. Fitbit has already died twice in my book. The first death came in 2015, when the company swallowed the sleep-tracking headband whole — when convenient, wrist-bound “toys” that guessed your state of consciousness from an arm twitch flooded the market, and the serious, EEG-based devices quietly went extinct. A victory of marketing over physiology. The second death was mine to witness this spring — poetic justice, served a decade cold. The Apple Watch did to Fitbit exactly what Fitbit had done to the headbands. The simple, screen-less bracelet I remembered was smothered by the very convenience culture Fitbit had helped create, its corpse replaced by mini-smartphones strapped to our wrists.
Which brings me back to my modern descent into tracking madness. In the previous chapter, “A glimmer of hope”, I left you with a new object: the Ultrahuman Ring PRO — the promise that had finally broken the Oura spell. A hope disproportionate to how little I actually knew. Not due until May 15th, the ring existed — publicly, at least — only as a promise. Not an independent review. And more importantly, no verdict from The Quantified Scientist, the voice I had learned to trust above all others. That chapter ended in the small hours of Sunday, April 26th.
May 7th, 2026. Eleven days had passed, and I was still doing what I had been doing, obsessively, all that time — checking The Quantified Scientist’s channel (external link) for any sign of the Ultrahuman Ring PRO. Half-hoping, half-dreading that he had finally run it through his EEG rig. Instead, I found something else entirely: a ghost. Sitting at the top of his channel, uploaded that very day, a video bearing a title I had to read twice: “Fitbit Air: The $99 Future of Fitbit (WHOOP alternative)”.
What I found was a new Fitbit. A different Fitbit. A Fitbit without a screen. Just a band. Just a sensor. Fitbit had come back to the place from which it had once disappeared. The company that had abandoned the screenless bracelet was now selling one again. Not as a relic. Not as a nostalgic reconstruction. As the future 1. I had to laugh. Maybe I was not the only one. Maybe Fitbit had realized that some of us — however few — still wanted the silence of a screenless wrist. And just like that, the brand I thought I had buried — twice — rose from the ashes.
Twice dead, thrice born
I dove into the video, searching for the catch. And there it was, delivered with the usual clinical precision: the technology was recycled. And yet, the verdict was encouraging. Despite relying on older sensors — which helped explain the remarkably low price — the Fitbit Air landed in the good part of The Quantified Scientist’s sleep-tracking plot. Not at the top. Not in the sacred territory occupied by the Oura Ring 4. But in the good part. Good enough to matter.
But — and here is where the grief refuses to fully lift — it wasn’t my bracelet. The Fitbit Air was sleek, minimalist, elegant even. But it wasn’t the one my memory kept insisting had existed. Not the impossible artifact that my dishonest mind created by fusing the Fitbit Flex and the Jawbone UP. It was, unmistakably, a tracker. A piece of equipment, functional but blunt, strapped to your wrist like a utilitarian reminder that your body is data to be quantified. Nothing about it whispers ornament. Everything about it announces function.
A tracker, not jewelry.
Some people will like that clarity. I’m no longer sure I do. After weeks of fixating on rings, the ring form factor has become my top choice. The ring, not the bracelet, has quietly become the default shape of this whole endeavor. Less visible. Less inclined to gather sweat against skin. Easier to keep clean, too. Cooler — in the literal and social senses. Somewhere along the way, without ever deciding it outright, I stopped picturing a band on my wrist and started picturing a circle on my finger instead. The Fitbit Air didn’t win me back my old shape. It just measured how far I’d already drifted from it.
But then I remembered who owned the net. Fitbit was Google. Not newly — the company had already belonged to Google for years. But now the Fitbit app’s future was being folded into the Google Health ecosystem. The brand might survive on the hardware; the software’s destiny was becoming unmistakably Google’s. My concern was not really privacy. It was something else entirely: continuity. Google has a well-documented relationship with things that work and people like: it ends them 2.
It kills products that work. Products people love. Products that quietly become load-bearing walls in someone’s daily life. I lived through the death of Google Podcasts and my forced — but ultimately happy — migration to AntennaPod. I built a morning routine around the Assistant, back when it still listened. And there was the geolocation function in Google Keep, another small feature that had worked well enough to become part of how I organized my life, until it wasn’t. The specter of another “we’ll support this today, drop it tomorrow” hangs over every new Fitbit release. And a net with an expiry date is not a safety net.
So I asked myself: if the ring — this shimmering, fragile hope of mine — fails, can I actually trust the ghost of Fitbit? I got my answer about a month later 3, in another video from The Quantified Scientist. The title promised cheer — “Fitbit Air Just Got BETTER!” — but buried inside it was a metric that chilled my enthusiasm: a 27.5% agreement rate for “Wake” detection. And wake detection is not a bonus stat. It is the binary ground truth — asleep or awake — on which everything else rests. A wearable could confuse light sleep with REM and still tell me something useful about the night. But if it tells me I am sleeping while I am lying there staring at the ceiling, it has failed at the most fundamental question a sleep tracker can be asked.
The safety net had a hole in it, right where it mattered. The ghost of Fitbit was flickering. And I was left, once again, waiting for the ring.
To be continued…
1 There is a special kind of comedy in watching the technology industry rediscover an idea it had previously discarded, rename it, place it inside a new marketing category, and sell it back to us as the future. Sometimes progress is simply a circle with better advertising. ^
2 Google possesses a legendary, almost pathological tendency to abandon its own creations. They build things that work, they cultivate communities that love them, and then, with a sudden and clinical indifference, they kill them. For anyone who enjoys a specific kind of dread, killedbygoogle.com keeps a running, community-maintained graveyard of discontinued Google products. It is a long list. It is not slowing down. ^
3 On June 6th, to be specific — a full three weeks after the Ultrahuman Ring PRO’s official release date (May 15th), and still no independent test from The Quantified Scientist. ^