| Read time 8 mins |
Before we dive in, I intended this week's edition to be a bit lighter, but given how much I've learned about hardware this past year, this one goes deep. Put on your reading glasses if you need them... let's go.
I’ve seen dozens of new tech enabled gadgets and wearables this year. Most of them you haven’t head of yet or maybe never will.
When most people think golf hardware, they jump straight to launch monitors. Fair, it's the most crowded corner of the market. But it's one slice of a much bigger board, and the launch monitor slice is already locked up tight.
Five players, TrackMan, Foresight, Full Swing, GOLFZON and TruGolf, hold roughly 76% of the launch monitor market between them. TrackMan alone is near 30%.
Walking in there means fighting the most defended position in golf with the least forgiving cost structure in tech. So let's widen the lens, because the device that owns the player can take a lot of forms:
Ball-flight tracking – launch monitors and radar (TrackMan, Foresight). The crowded one.
Force and pressure plates – the ground-reaction layer. Initial Force's Swing Catalyst stacks a pressure plate on a force plate to measure how a golfer loads and pushes off the ground, the invisible force underneath every swing.
Biomechanics wearables – sensors that read how the body actually moves. HackMotion straps to the wrist and tracks flexion through the swing, then feeds it into guided drills.
Smart equipment – sensors baked into the gear itself. CHIP’d is building the data straight into the ball, spin and launch off the strike.
Recovery and physiology – the wearables that won the rest of sports. Whoop and Oura don't measure your swing, they measure the athlete, and golfers are strapping them on too.
Different sensors, different spots, on the wrist, on the ball, under the feet, on the body, same promise underneath: this is data that didn't exist before, and whoever owns the device owns the player.
That promise is real. But every one of these devices, the radar, the plate, the wrist sensor, the smart ball, the recovery band, does the same thing to the company that builds it. So before you fall in love with any of them, understand what hardware does to your business.