Other Smart Scales

Renpho MorphoScan for $150: The Renpho MorphoScan full-body scanner looks surprisingly similar to the Runstar FG2015, including a near-identical display attached to the handlebars. Well, spoiler alert, they are basically the same scale. They even use the same app to collect data (and you can even use both scales simultaneously with it). The only reason this scale isn’t our top pick for the category is that it’s $15 more expensive. You can rest assured that a price war is looming.

Arboleaf Body Fat Scale CS20W

Photograph: Chris Null

Arboleaf Body Fat Scale CS20W for $40: This affordable Bluetooth scale isn’t the most eye-catching I’ve tested, owing to its big, silver electrodes and an oversized display that comes across as a bit garish. While weight is easy to make out, the six additional statistics showcased are difficult to read, all displayed simultaneously. I like the Arboleaf app better than the scale, where five more metrics can be found in addition to the seven above, each featuring a helpful explanation when tapping on it. It’s a solid deal at this price, but the upsell to get an “intelligent interpretation report” for an extra $40 per year is probably safe to skip.

Hume Health Body Pod

Photograph: Chris Null

Hume Health Body Pod for $183: Hume Health’s Body Pod, another full-body scanner with handles, is heavily advertised—at least to the apps on my phone—and touted (by Hume) as the Next Big Thing in the world of body management. While the app is indeed glossy and inviting, I was shocked to discover how flimsy the hardware felt, that it lacked Wi-Fi, and that some features are locked behind a $100-a-year Hume Plus subscription plan. It works fine enough, but you can get results that are just as good with a cheaper device.

Garmin Index S2 for $191: Five years after its release, the Index S2 is still Garmin’s current model, a surprise for a company otherwise obsessed with fitness. It’s still noteworthy for its lovely color display, which walks you through its six body metrics (for up to 16 users) with each weigh-in. The display also provides your weight trend over time in graphical form and can even display the weather. The scale connects directly to Wi-Fi and Garmin’s cloud-based storage system, so you don’t need a phone nearby to track your progress, as with Bluetooth-only scales. A phone running the Garmin Connect app (Android, iOS) is handy, so you can keep track of everything over time. Unfortunately, as health apps go, Connect is a bit of a bear, so expect a learning curve—especially if you want to make changes to the way the scale works. You can turn its various LCD-screen widgets on or off in the app, but finding everything can be difficult due to the daunting scope of the Garmin ecosystem. The color screen is nice at first, but ultimately adds little to the package.

Omron BCM-500 for $92: With its large LCD panel, quartet of onboard buttons, and oversize silver electrodes, the Omron BCM-500 is an eye-catching masterwork of brutalist design. If your bathroom is decked out in concrete and wrought iron, this scale will fit right in. The Bluetooth unit syncs with Omron’s HeartAdvisor app (Android, iOS), but it provides all six of its body metrics directly on the scale, cycling through them with each weigh-in (for up to four users). It can be difficult to read the label for each of the data points, in part because the LCD isn’t backlit, but the app is somewhat easier to follow, offering front-page graphs of weight, skeletal muscle, and body fat. On the other hand, the presentation is rather clinical, and the app is surprisingly slow to sync. For a scale without a Wi-Fi connection, it’s rather expensive too.

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I will admit to being afraid of scales—the kind that weigh you, not the ones on a snake. And so my first reaction to the idea I’d be getting a free body-scanning scale with a Factor prepared meal kit subscription was something akin to “Oh no!”

It’s always bad or shameful news, I figured, and maybe nothing I don’t already know. Though, as it turned out, I was wrong on both points.

Factor is, of course, the prepared meal brand from meal kit giant HelloFresh, which I’ve tested while reviewing dozens of meal kits this past year. Think delivery TV dinners, but actually fresh and never frozen. Factor meals are meant to be microwaved, but I found when I reviewed Factor last year that the meals actually tasted much better if you air-fry them (ideally using a Ninja Crispi, the best reheating device I know).

Especially, Factor excels at the low-carb and protein-rich diet that has become equally fashionable among people who want to lose weight and people who like to lift it. Hence, this scale. Factor would like you to be able to track your progress in gaining muscle mass, losing fat, or both. And then presumably keep using Factor to make your fitness or wellness goals.

While your first week of Factor comes at a discount right now, regular-price meals will be $14 to $15 a serving, plus $11 shipping per box. That’s less than most restaurant delivery, but certainly more than if you were whipping up these meals yourself.

If you subscribe between now and the end of March, the third Factor meal box will come with a free Withings Body Comp scale, which generally retails north of $200. The Withings doesn’t just weigh you. It scans your proportions of fat and bone and muscle, and indirectly measures stress levels and the elasticity of your blood vessels. It is, in fact, WIRED’s favorite smart scale, something like a fitness watch for your feet.

Anyway, to get the deal, use the code CONWITHINGS on Factor’s website, or follow the promo code link below.

Is It My Body

The scale that comes with the Factor subscription is about as fancy as it gets: a $200 Body Comp scale from high-tech fitness monitoring company Withings. The scale uses bioelectrical impedance analysis and some other proprietary methods in order to measure not just your weight but your body fat percentage, your lean muscle mass, your visceral fat, and your bone and water mass, your pulse rate, and even the stiffness of your arteries.

To get all this information, all you really need to do is stand on the scale for a few minutes. The scale will recognize you based on your weight (you’ll need to be accurate in describing yourself when you set up your profile for this to work), and then cycle through a series of measurements before giving you a cheery weather report for the day.

Your electrodermal activity—the “skin response via sweat gland stimulation in your feet”—provides a gauge of stress, or at least excitation. The Withings also purports to measure your arterial age, or stiffness, via the velocity of your blood with each heartbeat. This sounds esoteric, but it has some scientific backing.

Note that many physicians caution against taking indirect measurements of body composition as gospel. Other physicians counter that previous “gold standard” measurements aren’t perfectly accurate, either. It’s a big ol’ debate. For myself, I tend to take smart-scale measurements as a convenient way to track progress, and also a good home indicator for when there’s a problem that may require attention from a physician.

And so of course, I was petrified. So much bad news to get all at once! I figured.

In 2025, American and world leaders were preoccupied with wars in the Middle East. Most dramatically, first Israel and the United States bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities. Some commentators feared that President Trump’s decision to bomb Iran would drag the United States into the “forever wars” in the Middle East that presidential candidate Trump had pledged to avoid. The tragic war in Gaza had become a humanitarian disaster. After years of promising to reduce engagement with the region from Democratic and Republican presidents alike, it appeared that the US was being dragged back into Middle East once again.

I hope that’s not the case. Instead, in 2026, President Trump, his administration, the US Congress, and the American people more generally must realize that the real challenges to the American national interests, the free world, and global order more generally come not from the Middle East but from the autocratic China and Russia. The three-decade honeymoon from great power politics after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War is over. For the United States to succeed in this new era of great power competition, US strategists must first accurately diagnose the threat and then devise and implement effective prescriptions.

The oversimplified assessment is that we have entered a new Cold War with Xi’s China and his sidekick, Russian leader Vladimir Putin. To be sure, there are some parallels between our current era of great power competition and the Cold War. The balance of power in the world today is dominated by two great powers, the United States and China, much like the United States and the Soviet Union dominated the world during the Cold War. Second, like the contest between communism and capitalism during the last century, there is an ideological conflict between the great powers today. The United States is a democracy. China and Russia are autocracies. Third, at least until the second Trump era, all three of these great powers have sought to propagate and expand their influence globally. That too was the case during the last Cold War.

At the same time, there are also some significant differences. Superimposing the Cold War metaphor to explain everything regarding the US-China rivalry today distorts as much as it illuminates.

First, while the world is dominated by two great powers, the United States remains more powerful than China on many dimensions of power—military, economic, ideological—and especially so when allies are added to the equation. Also different from the Cold War, several mid-level powers have emerged in the global system—Brazil, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa, among others—that are not willing to join exclusively the American bloc or the Chinese bloc.

Second, while the ideological dimension of great power competition is real, it is not as intense as the Cold War. The Soviets aimed to spread communism worldwide, including in Europe and the United States. They were willing to deploy the Red Army, provide military and economic assistance, overthrow regimes, and fight proxy wars with the United States to achieve that aim. So far, Xi Jinping and the Communist Party of China have not employed these same aggressive methods to export their model of governance or construct an alternative world order. Putin is much more aggressive in propagating his ideology of illiberal nationalism and seeking to destroy the liberal international order. Thankfully, however, Russia does not have the capabilities of China to succeed in these revisionist aims.