Eddy Cue took over Apple’s health division after Jeff Williams retired, and the first thing he did was kill a project the company had spent years building.
That project was Mulberry, an AI-powered health coaching service Apple called Health+ internally. It was supposed to launch with iOS 27 in September, but now it’s dead.
Cue looked at what Oura and Whoop were doing and told his team Apple’s plan wasn’t competitive enough. That’s remarkable for a company that usually insists it doesn’t pay attention to competitors.
Cue’s right, though. Oura’s ring gives you a readiness score every morning that actually changes how you plan your day. Whoop’s recovery metrics tell athletes when to push and when to back off.
These companies figured out how to turn health data into actionable guidance, and they did it with apps on Apple’s own platform.
Apple has been playing defense. The Apple Watch can detect sleep apnea and send hypertension alerts, which is useful if you have those conditions.
But that’s reactive monitoring. It tells you when something might be wrong. It doesn’t help you get better, train smarter, or optimize recovery. Apple built a passive early warning system while smaller companies built actual coaching tools.
Now OpenAI is in the game. ChatGPT Health can analyze your health data, answer questions, and give feedback. Apple has been working on something similar with an internal system called World Knowledge Answers, but that’s still in development.
The new Siri that’s supposed to handle complex health queries won’t arrive until iOS 27 later this year. By then, how many people will already be using ChatGPT?
Apple’s still shipping most of what they built, just gradually through regular iOS updates. The video content from that Oakland studio gets folded into the Health app.
AI-driven suggestions based on your existing data are coming sometime this year. That iPhone camera feature that analyzes your gait is still being developed.
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Instead of packaging everything as Health+ with another monthly subscription fee, Apple is scattering these capabilities across free updates.
You could read that as consumer-friendly. Or you could read it as Apple realizing nobody wants to pay $10 a month for yet another service when Fitness+ already costs $10 and competitors offer more compelling experiences.
Breaking up the features lets Apple save face while avoiding a subscription that might have flopped.
Is Apple moving too slow in health and AI, or are they right to kill products that aren’t good enough? Let us know in the comments below.
