Apple Watch Close Your Rings Challenge Hits 10th Anniversary With Rare Band
What You Need to Know
- Apple runs annual month-long fitness challenge where employees compete to close Activity Rings daily.
- Winners receive exclusive watch bands never sold retail, creating secondary market demand worth five times retail price.
- 2026 marks 10th anniversary with commemorative black Sport Loop band featuring red, green, and blue lugs.
- Apple Watch prioritizes calorie and exercise metrics over step count, distinguishing it from Fitbit-era trackers.
Every year, Apple runs an internal fitness challenge where employees compete to close their Activity Rings daily for a full month. The winners don’t get a bonus or a trophy. They get a watch band.
The 2026 edition marks the 10th anniversary of this internal program, and the commemorative hardware reflects that. This year’s reward is a black Sport Loop with lugs and an end piece colored to match the three Activity Ring colors: Move (red), Exercise (green), and Stand (blue). Employees also receive a small enamel pin. The band itself will never appear in Apple’s retail lineup, which is precisely what makes it circulate on resale markets within weeks of distribution.
Apple has been running employee wellness challenges long enough that a secondary collector economy has formed around the rewards. Past bands surface on eBay and Japanese auction sites at prices well above what any retail Sport Loop commands, sometimes by a factor of five or more. The scarcity is real, not manufactured for customers, which is an unusual dynamic for Apple hardware.
The Fitness Tracking Behind the Ritual
The challenge is built around closing rings, but step count is still recorded throughout the day and stored in the Health database alongside the ring data. Apple has always treated steps as secondary to the calorie and exercise metrics the rings surface, a deliberate design choice that separates Apple Watch from the Fitbit-era framing of fitness tracking.
The 10th anniversary framing matters because it puts the Close Your Rings concept at roughly the same age as the Apple Watch itself, which launched in April 2015. The challenge predates most of Apple’s current health features, including ECG, blood oxygen, and crash detection. What started as an internal morale program has quietly outlasted several product generations.
For collectors, the band’s value is mostly symbolic. For Apple, it’s a low-cost way to sustain internal enthusiasm for a product the company needs its own employees to believe in.
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