The Whoop 5 0 MG is a disappointment

It's almost a law of the universe that a bigger company gets, the more they start to take advantage of their customers, especially if they have a monopoly. And unfortunately, this may have happened to my favorite fitness tracker, the Whoop. If you don't know what Whoop is, it's a band that goes on your wrist and tracks all of your health data, such as your sleep, your heart rate, and your steps. It's unique in that it doesn't have a watch face like a garment or an apple, and you never have to take it off even to charge it. There's nothing quite like it, or nothing quite as convenient. And I've used almost every type of health tracker from smartwatches, rings, to even a sleep pad. That one was bad. But about a month ago, during their launch of their Whoop 5.0, they lied to everyone. But I still ended up buying it. You see, the Whoop 5.0 is an upgrade to the existing Whoop 4.0. And traditionally, they've promised that with every upgrade, you get it for free when your yearly membership renews. It's been on their sales pages, their podcasts, everywhere, basically forever, until it was quietly removed right before the launch of their 5.0. With the new 5.0 generation came improvements in the hardware, the battery life, and overall features, which I was pumped about. Now I know some of you think health trackers are gimmicks, are marketing BS. I get that. From my poll last week, only about a third of you used them, which is absolutely crazy to me. I love getting insights into how my resting heart rate decreases with training, how my diet and sleep impact my recovery, and how my VO2 max is climbing after consistently working out. Am I a fitness nerd? Plus, they can tell you if you're getting sick. Or in my case, it even told me that I was pregnant when I had a baby two years ago. All these metrics are important to track if you want to increase your lifespan and just feel and operate better overall. So I don't think health tracking is just some gimmick that some people make it out to be. It's a real tool. And that's what it is, a tool. But I was really excited about the 5.0 launch. I was curious about what improvements we might get, what new data I could track and learn from. But instead of one product, Whoop introduced two new products. The 5.0 and the 5.0 MG. Huh, that's interesting. The first one, the 5.0, comes with a much better battery life. So instead of seven days, you now get 14. Sounds pretty good. Less charging just makes everything better. And that was my biggest complaint about the Apple Watch, is that you have to charge it every single day. But wait, a battery life is it? That's all the upgrades? What about the new features? Now there's something else that made it even worse too. But first, we need to talk about the 5.0 MG version. The new top-of-the-line offering from Whoop. And boy, this one made me angry. All the newer features, besides the battery life, are now gated behind the MG tier. So if you already have the 4.0, you still get the 5.0 for free when your membership renews. But if you want the MG version, get ready to shell out some serious dough. This new tier was Whoop's sneaky way of delivering their promise of the free upgrade to the 5, while locking all the new features behind a higher price tier. And when I say higher price tier, we're talking about a hefty $359 a year over the base price at $200, and the peak tier at $240. At that price, you could buy a brand new smartwatch every year. This subscription model is starting to look like a scam subscription model. So what does this new MG price tier have to make them charge so much more, you may ask? Well, it's essentially two new things. You get insights into your daily blood pressure, and you can do a heart screen with the ECG and AFib detection. Sounds pretty advanced, right? Well, these are awesome features to have if you have any heart health issues or high blood pressure. Now, I wasn't that curious about the ECG or AFib stuff. I don't really have heart problems, so I can't comment on that. But my husband does have pre hypertension or slightly elevated blood pressure. Not so high that he needs medication, but high enough that it's worth keeping an eye on. So I was interested to see how this might track the blood pressure and let us know what things impact those levels the most. Is it diet? Is it exercise or something else? And as a tech creator, I was curious about the product in general. So it was easy to validate the purchase. I just wanted to try it out. So how helpful was the blood pressure tracking? Well, I'll go over it soon. There's one more thing that added insult to the injury. When you upgrade from the 4.0 to the 5 and the MG, all your 4.0 bands no longer work. Even though it looks like it's the exact same device. It looks the same, but Whoop made the 5 band just a few millimeters different. Just enough where the older bands don't fit anymore. This is important because since you never take your Whoop off, if you ever swim or get sweaty, you usually have to swap out the band. You wash the dirty one and you let it dry while you wear your second band. So even if you have multiple 4.0 bands already, now you need to buy new ones for the 5 so you're not always wearing a dirty band and getting rashes and stuff like that. And the bands aren't cheap. They're sitting at $50 a pop. So now we've spent $359 for two people to upgrade to the MG and paid for an extra band for each of us. Was it worth the money? That is so much money. It's so much. So looking at the device itself, it does look a little nicer. They added a shiny look to the metal part of the band. Probably so everyone can see you wear the MG version and then want it too. It's almost like they're trying to turn it into a low-key status symbol. But I do have a couple of complaints. The first is that the bands are so inconsistent. Sometimes they're perfectly toleranced and other times they aren't. They just slide right off. The ones that I got are super frustrating and finicky. The device tends to slip off the band easily and this bar doesn't even hook on as well and it's just, it's annoying. My 4.0 bands had a more friction fit so it could stay on better and the bar snapped on tighter. So it's pretty annoying to take on and off and swap out the band even though you have to do that like every day. But a bigger issue is the device itself or rather its accuracy when you're working out. When you're running or biking or whatever, you typically track your heart rate to see if you're in the right zone or not. But with the MG, I found it likes to jump up and down and up and down a lot more erratically when recording my heart rate especially at the beginning of a workout. It'll go to 130 and then 155 and then back to like 108 even if my workout was the same. I thought I was going crazy so I wore a Garmin watch at the same time on the other side and it did everything a lot more accurately. Now I never had this problem with the previous 4.0. It wasn't until I tried the 5.0 MG that this became a problem. I was able to fix it but I had to start wearing my band ultra tight to get the heart rate to stop jumping around. It's a bit more uncomfortable to wear while working out now which sucks. It's like I paid more for a device that performs worse and it's not just me. The 5.0 MG has a real hardware problem. In a video from the Quantified Scientist, he mentions how the 4 and the 5 have the same sensors but the MG has new sensors that are actually less accurate. So it really is a case of spend more and get less. But wait, what about all those new features you mentioned? Did you actually see any positive results with blood pressure tracking? Well, I did test out all the new features. The ECG was super easy to do. You just hold down the sides while running it in the app and you sit still and you get a proper report. This came back healthy and I thought to myself, wait, that's it? That's all? I paid money for that? If you have heart problems, maybe this is super important. So let me know if you benefit from this. The blood pressure tracking on the other hand, I have some mixed feelings about. So to use it, you actually need a manual blood pressure cuff first. Now I didn't understand why you would need a manual one when your whoop should track it with the new hardware and the new software. But then I realized whoop probably wants a manual measurement for two reasons. One, they need to cover their booty. If whoop tells you your blood pressure is healthy, but it actually isn't, it could open them up to lawsuits if someone wore it, assumed their blood pressure was good when it really wasn't and then they had a heart attack. Yikes, gotta cover your butt. Number two, since this technology is so new, it feels like we're training the software more than software is benefiting us. But we have to pay to do that. Yeah, you gotta love that. I'll get more into why I think this soon because after my husband and I took our manual scores using a blood pressure device at the gym, we saw that he did in fact have slightly elevated blood pressure. So we now get to see how accurate whoop's measurements are moving forward by comparing it with the manual test. So over the next few days, whoop would give us blood pressure ranges that are just laughable. Laughable because the range is super wide. For example, on the second day, he got a systolic, the top number, of 114 to 134 and a diastolic of 73 to 83. Both of these ranges are so wide, you can't actually tell if you're healthy or elevated or not or who knows. We kept tracking real data points about twice a week and training the whoop band to hopefully become more accurate. So instead of learning from the whoop, we actually learned from just using the manual blood cuff on what things made it go down to a healthy range. It wasn't eating healthy or sleep or exercise even. The biggest thing tied to lowering his blood pressure was getting more steps. Yeah, I didn't expect that one either. Simply going for walks was the biggest thing that drove his blood pressure down to a healthy range. So while I'm glad the whoop got us to start tracking this data so we can learn from it, the actual device itself isn't too helpful. The ranges are so wide that it will always be right but I wouldn't trust it for accurate measurements. Instead, it's probably better to just measure your blood pressure manually instead. So if I had to do it all over again, would I buy the MG? No, just flat out no. Even if you have blood pressure issues. We'll probably both downgrade to the normal five next year when it refreshes or maybe it's time to look at some of those competitors coming up because they are popping up. And I do plan on checking them out to find a brand that doesn't actually take advantage of its customers. Thanks for watching my tech rant and check out this video here. And I can't wait to try out Polar and Garmin and whoever else is gonna make these things.