Is the Basis Peak still sold?

No. Intel recalled every Basis Peak in June 2016 over a battery overheating issue and stopped selling the watch immediately. It has not been re-released and was never replaced.

Can a Basis Peak still sync with the app?

No. Intel shut down the Basis cloud and removed the iOS and Android apps from the stores by the end of December 2016. Even a device with a working battery cannot upload, sync, or restore data.

Was the Basis Peak FDA-cleared?

No. The Peak was marketed as a consumer fitness watch, not a medical device. It never carried 510(k) clearance, and its heart-rate readings were never validated for clinical use.

How many Basis Peak units did Intel recall?

Roughly 200,000 units sold in the US and Canada, per the joint CPSC and Health Canada notices issued on August 4, 2016. The voluntary recall began in June; the formal notice came two months later.

What is the closest 2026 equivalent to a Basis Peak?

For continuous heart rate, sleep stages, and multi-day battery in a slim form factor, the Fitbit Charge 6 is the nearest spiritual successor. The Garmin Vivosmart 5 is the alternative if you want to avoid a subscription. We compare them in our alternatives guide .

Basis Peak: the complete archive of Intel's discontinued health watch

The Basis Peak is the watch most people only remember because of the recall. That’s fair — it shipped with a battery that, under specific conditions, could blister the wrist of the person wearing it — but it also shortens an interesting story.

Basis Science, the San Francisco startup that built the Peak, was the first company to put a working multi-sensor health tracker on the consumer wrist. Heart rate, skin temperature, perspiration, and movement, on the same chip array, in 2013. Intel bought the company in March 2014, launched the Peak that November, and pulled it off the market less than two years later. By the end of 2016 the cloud was off, the app was gone from the stores, and the team had been quietly folded into Intel’s New Devices Group, which itself was wound down soon after.

This page is the index. Click through to the deep dives on the recall, the sleep tracking, the heart-rate accuracy, the corporate story, and the modern devices we’d buy if we still wanted what the Peak was trying to be.

The short version

The Basis Peak launched in November 2014 at $199. Intel had bought Basis Science seven months earlier for a reported $100M–$150M.
In June 2016, Intel started voluntarily refunding Peak owners after reports of the watch overheating, blistering, and burning skin. The formal CPSC/Health Canada recall notice followed on August 4, 2016. Roughly 200,000 units were affected.
The companion app and cloud shut down on December 31, 2016. A few Reddit posts from 2017 onward show users with stockpiled Peaks unable to do anything with them.
Today a Peak is a dead device. The case is intact, the OLED still lights up, the battery is six-plus years old and not safe to keep charging, and there is no path to read data off it.

What the Peak actually did well

A lot of the conversation around the Peak is “Intel killed it.” That’s true but glosses over what it got right.

The Peak was the first mainstream wrist device that did continuous, all-day heart rate without asking you to start a workout. Fitbit’s Charge HR shipped around the same time and competed directly; the Apple Watch didn’t ship until April 2015 and didn’t track continuous HR until later firmware. The Peak’s optical sensor was paired with a galvanic skin response sensor and a skin-temperature thermistor, which let the Basis app guess at “habit” patterns (caffeine, late nights, recovery state) that nobody else was guessing at.

The sleep tracking, separately, was better than most reviewers gave it credit for. The Peak inferred sleep stages from heart rate, skin temperature, perspiration, and motion, instead of motion alone. That’s the same multi-signal approach Oura would later make famous. We have a longer write-up of the Peak’s sleep tracking and how it stacks up.

It was also a watch you could ignore for four days between charges. The display only lit up when you raised your wrist, and there was no AMOLED panel burning battery. By comparison, an Apple Watch Series 9 still needs a charge every night.

What it got wrong

The headline failure is the battery, but the Peak had been wobbling commercially before then.

The original 2013 Basis B1 — the round, plastic-bodied tracker the company made before Intel’s acquisition — was a clinically interesting product with a confusing interface and a flaky companion app. The Peak was a redesign aimed at the smartwatch market: bigger screen, square OLED, notifications, a more aggressive sport-watch look. It got pulled in two directions: not enough of a watch to compete with the Apple Watch, not enough of a band to compete with the Fitbit Charge HR. Reviewers at the time noted that the touchscreen lagged badly in cold weather and that the optical HR sensor lost the signal during high-intensity workouts. We dig into that in the Peak review.

Then the firmware update. In November 2015 Intel pushed an update intended to improve the optical sensor’s performance. Almost immediately, support forums filled with reports of overheating. Intel issued a fix in March 2016, but the burn complaints kept coming. By June, the company had stopped trying to patch it and went to a full refund.

Why this matters for what you buy now

Three lessons survive from the Peak, and they’re the lens we use on every modern wearable we cover:

A wearable is a cloud product. The Peak’s data lived on Intel’s servers. When the servers went away, so did the years of data. If you cannot export your data on demand, you do not own it. We cover this in cloud-dependent wearables.
Optical heart-rate is unreliable enough that you need to know its failure modes. Modern wrist optical HR is better than the Peak’s was, but it still gets confused by tattoos, cold weather, and rapid HR changes. Sensor accuracy is its own topic.
Battery chemistry is not a solved problem. A wrist device with a 0.5 Wh battery, a sealed case, and a thin metal back can become a small heating element if any single thing in the charging stack fails. We treat unusually thin trackers with mild suspicion.

The rest of the archive

Each of these pages is a deep dive into a specific part of the Basis Peak story. They’re written for two audiences: people who owned one and want the historical record, and people who landed here researching wearable health and want context for what the industry learned (or didn’t).

The Basis Peak review (retrospective) — what it was actually like to wear, in the words of people who did.
The Basis Peak recall, in full — CPSC notice details, refund mechanics, what Intel said and when.
Can you still use a Basis Peak? — the short answer is no, and here is why down to the firmware level.
Intel’s Basis Science acquisition — how a $100M+ deal led to a discontinued product line in 24 months.
Why the Basis Peak failed — product, organizational, and market reasons, separated out.
Basis Peak vs Fitbit Charge — a historical comparison with its real competitor.
Basis Peak sleep tracking — the multi-sensor sleep approach the Peak shipped before Oura made it famous.
Basis Peak heart-rate accuracy — what we know from contemporary reviews and the Basis support corpus.
Modern alternatives to the Basis Peak in 2026 — the watches and bands we’d buy now to do what the Peak tried to do.

New 2026 alternatives and comparisons

These newer buying guides are where we would send a former Basis Peak owner now:

Best fitness trackers without a health subscription fee - the cleanest modern answer to “I want my health data without a monthly bill.”
Best smart rings for sleep in 2026 - the closest descendants of the Peak’s multi-sensor sleep idea.
Smart ring vs Apple Watch for sleep and recovery - the modern form-factor split the Peak never resolved.
Who owns your wearable health data - the export and cloud-dependency lesson the Peak made impossible to ignore.

What to do if you still have one

You can’t sync it, you can’t sell it (Amazon and eBay flag the recalled SKUs), and the battery is well past safe service life. The right move is the recycling one:

Stop charging it. The recall was specifically about overheating during use after charging.
Store it somewhere non-flammable (a metal mint tin works) until you can drop it off.
Take it to an e-waste collection that handles lithium-ion batteries. Big-box retailers in the US (Best Buy in particular) accept old wearables for free.

If you want the historical record, the Health Canada recall notice is still online, and the Wayback Machine has snapshots of the Basis support pages from before the shutdown.