Apple Cuts Fitness+ Audio Jobs After a Long Review

Apple cut a handful of Apple Fitness+ jobs in mid-September 2026, and the losses landed on the team that makes Time to Walk and Time to Run. Mark Gurman, who covers the company, said people inside the unit treat the move as the start of deeper cost cuts and other major changes over the months and years ahead.

A Handful of Jobs Hit the Audio Team

The cuts were small by Apple’s standards, and they were aimed at a specific product, not the whole workout catalog. Time to Walk and Time to Run are audio sessions that run from an Apple Watch with headphones, so a subscriber can walk or run without parking in front of a TV. Gurman said new audio episodes will still be made, only less often, and that the formats are not being pulled.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The jobs: A handful of Fitness+ staff were let go in mid-September 2026, and the losses hit the audio group behind Time to Walk and Time to Run.
• The catalog: New audio episodes will continue, at a slower pace, and Gurman said the two formats are not being discontinued.
• The service: Fitness+ remains on sale at $9.99 a month or $79.99 a year, the same list prices Apple set at launch.
• The prior round: The audio cuts came weeks after Apple eliminated more than 200 roles across Vision Pro, Siri, and related software teams on August 21, 2026.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• Next headcount: No figure has been given for further Fitness+ job cuts, only that people inside the group expect more cost cuts and structural change.
• A Health-app merge: Fitness+ now sits with Apple’s health leadership, but Apple has not said the workout service will be folded into the Health app.
• A shutdown: Gurman has said Apple is not treating the service as an easy kill, because a loyal audience would make the headlines more expensive than the savings.

That last point is why a handful of roles still matters. The company did not announce a wind-down. It slowed the one Fitness+ product that has to be booked, recorded, and shipped on a weekly clock.

Fitness+ Went Under Review in November 2025

The audio layoffs did not come out of a quiet year. On November 9, 2025, Gurman wrote that the future of Fitness+ was under review, called it one of Apple’s “weakest digital offerings,” and pointed to high churn and little revenue upside. He also said the service was inexpensive enough to run that closing it would not be worth the backlash.

Those two observations can sit together. Killing the whole product would save little and create a health-brand mess. Slowing the celebrity-audio factory trims the part that has to be remade every week. Ten months after that review, the first visible cut landed on Time to Walk and Time to Run.

Sumbul Desai, Apple’s vice president of Health, added Fitness+ to her portfolio as part of that review. Health, including Fitness+, was moved under Eddy Cue, the senior vice president of Services, after Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams stepped down. The workout service is now judged on a services balance sheet, next to Music and TV+, not as a Watch accessory that can run at a loss forever.

Gurman followed up on September 20, 2026, writing that Apple is now making job cuts at the division, months after he said the company was reevaluating Fitness+.

THE FITNESS+ CLOCK FROM LAUNCH TO THE CUTS

1. September 15, 2020: Apple unveils Fitness+ as a Watch-centered workout subscription.
2. December 14, 2020: The service launches at $9.99 a month or $79.99 a year in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK, and the US.
3. January 25, 2021: Time to Walk debuts on Apple Watch with Dolly Parton, Draymond Green, Shawn Mendes, and Uzo Aduba.
4. January 10, 2022: Time to Run starts, with new episodes each Monday.
5. October 24, 2022: Fitness+ opens to iPhone users in its then 21 countries even without an Apple Watch.
6. November 9, 2025: Gurman says the future of Fitness+ is under review and that Desai is taking the service into Health.
7. December 15, 2025: Apple expands Fitness+ into 28 new markets, taking it to 49 countries and regions, with Japan due early the next year.
8. August 21, 2026: Apple cuts more than 200 jobs across Vision Pro, Siri, and software groups.
9. Mid-September 2026: A handful of Fitness+ audio jobs are cut; Gurman reports it on September 20.

The December 2025 expansion is the piece that makes the new cuts look strange until you look at what actually scaled. Apple added markets with digitally dubbed workouts in Spanish and German, with Japanese dubbing tied to the Japan launch, using generated voices based on its 28 trainers. That is a software trick. Time to Walk still needs a guest, a walk, a playlist, and a production team.

The 2020 Studio Bet Never Changed Price

Apple sold Fitness+ as the first fitness service built around Apple Watch. Studio classes played on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV, with heart rate, rings, and a Burn Bar drawn from the Watch. Jay Blahnik, then senior director of Fitness Technologies, said choosing to work out is often the hard part, and that Fitness+ was meant to make the next session simple across Apple devices.

The commercial terms barely moved. The monthly and annual prices in December 2025 were the same dollars Apple printed in December 2020. Family sharing still covers up to five other family members. What changed is distribution: more countries, no Watch requirement from October 2022, Custom Plans, a K-Pop music lane, and those dubbed trainer voices.

FITNESS+ AT LAUNCH AND IN LATE 2025

A price that never rose is a tell. Music, TV+, and iCloud have all been used as levers on the services line. Fitness+ stayed cheap because it was a Watch companion first, a standalone studio second. High churn follows from that design. People who buy a Watch get months free, sample the trainers, then cancel once the new-class feeling wears off, while the studio still has to film next week’s slate.

By January 2022 Apple was already talking about a library of almost 2,000 studio workouts and meditations. That is a lot of video to keep current, and it is also a lot of video a subscriber can exhaust. Paying every month for classes that do not change under you is the exact habit a gym-app customer breaks first.

Time to Walk Was Built for the Wrist

Time to Walk was the outdoor answer to those indoor classes. It launched on January 25, 2021, as a 25 to 40 minute audio walk that starts from the Workout app, shows photos on the Watch, and ends with a guest’s short playlist. Wheelchair users get Time to Push. Apple leaned on celebrity booking rather than a second trainer roster, which is how Dolly Parton, an NBA forward, a pop singer, and an Emmy-winning actor opened the series in the same week.

I’ve loved walking ever since I was a little girl in the Smoky Mountains. I think it’s so important to be able to get out and walk if we can during this time.

Dolly Parton, Time to Walk, January 2021

That line is the 2020 product in miniature. Fitness+ was built while people were stuck at home and still being told to move. Time to Walk put a famous voice on a sidewalk and called it a workout. Prince William later closed the second season talking about staying mentally fit. By the December 2025 expansion Apple was still promoting walks with Cynthia Erivo, Daddy Yankee, Naomi Campbell, Simu Liu, Shawn Mendes, Jane Fonda, and Formula 1 driver Yuki Tsunoda.

Time to Run arrived on January 10, 2022, as the harder sibling. Apple launched Time to Run as a weekly audio series with routes in London, Brooklyn, and Miami Beach, coached by Emily Fayette, Sam Sanchez, Cory Wharton-Malcolm, and the rest of the running staff, with a new episode each Monday. It needed an Apple Watch and headphones, and it worked outdoors or on a treadmill. For wheelchair users it became Time to Run or Push.

Those shows are expensive in a way a dubbed HIIT class is not. Someone has to book the guest or send a trainer to a city, cut the tape, license the photos, and hit a Monday slot. When Gurman says the audio team was the group that lost jobs, he is describing the only Fitness+ line that still behaves like a weekly series. The on-demand video library can coast on what is already shot. Time to Walk cannot.

Health Now Owns the Workout Catalog

Desai’s group is the other half of the bill. Apple used its September 2026 event to show a rebuilt Health app, with an Insights tab, a Longevity view, and a Health Age reading drawn from Watch data such as VO2 max, resting heart rate, sleep, and heart-rate variability. The first iOS 27.2 developer beta on September 16, 2026, let testers see that design. Apple said the new Health app would not actually ship in iOS 27.2 and would arrive later in 2026.

That is a different product from a celebrity walk. Health Age, readiness, and on-device movement checks turn the Watch into a clinic-adjacent dashboard. Fitness+ is a content feed. Once both report to the same health vice president, the feed has to justify its studio costs against software that scales with a software update.

Blahnik, by then vice president of Fitness Technologies, greeted the December 2025 expansion by talking about metrics on the Watch and on AirPods Pro 3, and about carrying workouts on iPhone and iPad. The hardware already shows heart rate and rings without a Fitness+ trainer on screen. The subscription is the talking, the music, and the face in the studio. If Health is going to be the place Apple explains your body to you, the talking can live there, and the studio becomes optional.

Apple has not said it will merge Fitness+ into Health. The org chart already did the first merge. Desai owns both, Cue owns Desai, and the audio team is the first Fitness+ group to shrink under that stack.

Original Video Already Took a Hit

The August 21, 2026 cuts are the closest parallel, and they were much larger. Apple eliminated more than 200 jobs, with about 100 of them in the Vision Pro organization and about 100 on Siri and software teams, including Intelligent Systems Experience. A Vision Pro gaming group was largely shut down. The unit that makes Immersive Video was reduced after the company decided those films, which can cost millions of dollars, were hard to justify for a small headset audience.

Apple said at the time that it was realigning teams “to evolve our business to deliver the best experiences for our users,” and that new roles would be created while some existing ones went away. Fitness+ has not received a matching public statement. The method is the same even if the headcount is not.

THE ORIGINAL CONTENT APPLE HAS STARTED TO SHRINK

• Vision Pro Immersive Video: In-house films that can cost millions were cut back in August 2026 because too few people watch them on the headset.
• Vision Pro gaming: The dedicated gaming team was largely shut down in the same round, as Apple shifted headset work toward other hardware bets.
• Fitness+ audio: Time to Walk and Time to Run lost a handful of jobs in mid-September 2026, and new episodes will arrive less often.
• Siri and software: About 100 roles were removed as Apple rebuilt Siri on a new AI stack that needed different skills.

In each case the platform stayed. The costly original production around it was the part that got smaller. Fitness+ video classes are still the storefront. The Watch-only audio series was the boutique line, and boutique lines get fewer staff when a service is under review.

What Slower Time to Walk Releases Mean

For someone who actually uses the walks, the change is a thinner Monday. The old promise was a new guest on a regular clock, with photos on the Watch and a playlist at the end. A slower cadence turns Time to Walk into a back catalog, closer to a podcast feed that has stopped pretending it is live. Time to Run, which was built as a weekly city series, takes the same hit.

That is also how churn works on a class app. Once the rotation feels familiar, the $9.99 charge looks like a bill for videos you already finished. Fitness+ has a devoted core that will keep closing rings with the same trainers. It has a much larger group that arrived with a free Watch trial, sampled a month of HIIT, and left. Gurman named that pattern in 2025. The audio cuts are one way to stop spending studio money on people who were going to cancel anyway.

This is widely seen within the Fitness+ organization as the beginning of more drastic cost-cutting measures and other major changes to the service in the months and years ahead.

Mark Gurman, Power On newsletter, September 20, 2026

The service is still in 49 countries and regions, still priced at $9.99, and still filming trainers in 12 workout types. The part Apple is paying down is the weekly audio factory it built when a walk with Dolly Parton felt like the future of the Watch. New Time to Walk and Time to Run episodes will keep coming. They will just come less often.