“The Apple Watch could be Apple’s next mass-market iPod-like product, but the company’s not quite ready to see it popping up everywhere yet,” Luke Dormehl reports for Cult of Mac.
“With the Apple Watch launch just 24 days away, Apple has reportedly declined to supply the U.K.’s largest mobile phone retailer, Carphone Warehouse, with its debut wearable device,” Dormehl reports. “Although Carphone Warehouse has 800 stores around Britain, Apple is targeting high-end fashionable retailers for its first wave of Apple Watch sales.”
Dormehl writes, “By associating the Apple Watch with luxury brands, Apple later has the option of selling the device in places like Carphone Warehouse, while still keeping the sheen of exclusivity.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: There will be plenty of time to move Apple Watch and Apple Watch Sport sales down to the likes of Carphone Warehouse et al. later in the year.
The writer exaggerates with the word brilliant (as least as far as American English connotations go). Brilliant to me seems to be “near-genius”, as if nobody else has thought of this before. Well, it has. iPhone 1 , iPad, iPod, and many models of Macs all had restricted places to purchase.
Also, there may not be enough Watches to sell to outside retailers. Simple math.
Brilliant also means intelligent, clever, smart, astute, intellectual, etc.
Your problem stems from analyzing a Brit’s writing as if he were American, which he is not.
“Brilliant” is used widely in the UK in contexts an American would never do so. I worked with a contractor who kept wanting to correct my Scottish boss when he continually described things as being brilliant. I had to explain things to him and then he calmed down.
Brits use “brilliant” slightly differently and a bit more often than we do in the States.
I suppose they could’ve gone with the vernacular “awesome” or “like, totally awesome” that the under-45 crowd in the US uses…
Indeed ‘awesome’ would be the best equivalent in this instance its a type of exclamation that has become increasingly part of normal conversation outside of its original teenage origins.
“American English” – It’s just English 😉
This is simply Apple’s way to achieve 2 strategies:
– AppleWatch exclusive feel
– Increase share of direct iPhone sales
Go Apple…
The brilliance of Apple’s move is that Carphone Warehouse is a downmarket operation that would like to use Apple Watch as bait to get people through the door so that they can sell them something different.
That’s exactly what Carphone Warehouse did with iPhones and it’s very significant that they have announced plans to stock a range of rival wearables in anticipation of the interest generated by Apple Watch, even though all the other wearables that CW will be stocking have conspicuously failed to generate any excitement. They hope to offload crappy wearables onto unsuspecting suckers in order to make a quick sale.
Apple is defining the Apple Watch brand as an aspirational brand and it’s retail plans support that principle. Restricting initial sales to places where Apple Watch will be treated with respect is a key aspect of Apple’s strategy and downmarket outlets like CW would be a very bad fit with that concept.
Yep, if you’re going to flog an iPhone 6 of the back of the watch it might as well. At an Apple store
When Apple delivered a system for ‘infotainment’ in an automobile, they didn’t name it Horseless Carriage Play. They named it Car Play. Does anyone anywhere have a ‘carphone’? How about a buggy whip? Some people may still have them but a carphone? Come on UK, move with the times.
Carphone warehouse, it’s a very unfortunate name, a bit like Microsoft, nobody calls personal computers micro computers anymore, come on the US get with it, oh hang on a sec Microsoft is just one company in the US that doesn’t actually represent the general population of the US, it’s a company saddled with an unfortunate legacy name just like Carphone warehouse. Carphone warehouse was formed back in 1989 when mobile phones were too chunky to carry around so most we’re used in cars, hence the name, I bet the chief exec wishes they’d called it something else 26 years ago.