Apple's forthcoming "Health Age" feature, unveiled alongside a new readiness metric and redesigned Health app, joins a crowded field of wearables and gadgets offering their own "biological age" style scores, including Whoop, Oura, Withings and Garmin. Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song argues these metrics are largely unreliable and culturally loaded, since each device calculates its "age" differently and results can vary wildly even for the same person, making the numbers more about ego than genuine health insight.

Testing several devices on herself, Song found wide discrepancies against her real age of 38: Whoop put her at 42, Oura estimated her heart as two years younger, Withings gave a vascular age a year older but a heart age four years younger, Garmin's fitness age was 36.5, a CES "longevity mirror" gave a facial skin age of 26 and physiological age of 35, and her smart mattress topper said she was "trending older" at 38.7. She notes such scores can highlight useful behavioural gaps, such as her Whoop age being skewed by insufficient strength training, but warns that Western cultural attitudes to ageing turn the metric into a boast when favourable and a source of shame when not, citing Apple health executive Sumbul Desai's suggestion that people might brag about their Health Age to friends.