Newer Not Better: Treadmill Updates Cause Problems

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 01, 2026,
updated Aug 01, 2026

Seeing how gym equipment became "smart", it was just a matter of time before the era of "vibe coding" (crappy, plagiarised code) and shoddy-testing-era or OTA-fix-it-over-the-air-deployment would cause chaos. And because managers of companies almost never coded anything, they would not understand their engineers. Or because of the slop hype, they'd falsely assume that non-developers can produce code. They call it "AI" - they believe it is like magic!

We quit the gym after ~20 years, but recently we heard from someone about what happens in "modern" or "smart" gyms.

The machines get "updates" (because of course they connect to the Internet!) and aside from worthless beveled edges (bloat) and a worse interface - worse use of screen estate, takes longer to do the same selections as before - there are bugs that can cause a blank screen, plus there's now a disconnected machine. The treadmill was put "offline". The funny thing? There's a magical ratio: 100% of updated machines have defects, whereas after 2 years the un-updated machines still function fine. That's 2 out of 2. In summary, all the updated machines have problems, those that did not receive updates still work.

Maybe one core issue is that today's machines - overpriced equipment like treadmills (they cost about 6,000 pounds each) - need software updates. Whose idea was this? █