“Apple products excite imaginations, I’d even venture that iDevices are psychotoxic and drive unbalanced members of the kommentariat to cast off their moorings. And of all of Apple’s devices so far, the Watch has induced the most extreme symptoms of the affliction,” Jean-Louis Gassée writes for Monday Note. “This was due, in part, to expectations that were set by the iPhone, which rose from 2.3M units in its first Holiday quarter in 2007, to 74.8M units in the 2015 Xmas period. Surely, Apple is positioning the Watch to be the next stage in the personal computer rocket, a belief that yielded unhinged first year sales forecasts of 10 million, 20 million, 24 million, 30 million, 40 million, even 60 million units! All before the first unit shipped.”
“The company’s deep-seated secretiveness may help explain these excesses. Lacking ‘guidance’ from Apple, pundits’ imaginations run wild,” Gassée writes. “Absent official numbers, the methods used to estimate sales range from reasonable samplings to the amateurish harvesting of gossip from the Internet echo chamber… So, given the lack of official numbers, just how do we measure the Watch’s present success and estimate its future?For a start, we can turn to sources such as Bernard Desarnauts’ Wristly Research which surveys the opinions, usage patterns, likes and dislikes of actual smartwatch owners.”
“Wristly’s estimate of 12 to 13M units sold is echoed and amplified by the Wall Street Journal, which pegs first year Watch sales at 15 to 16M units for about $6B in revenue — that’s $1.5B more than Rolex for the same time period,” Gassée writes. “That the Watch’s impressive numbers — even as estimates — and owner satisfaction levels can be taken as an indication of failure is, to be polite, puzzling.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If you do not yet have an Apple Watch, you are really missing out.
We’ve had our Apple Watches on our wrists since Friday, April 24, 2015 and very happily so.
Here’s what we use our Watches for in order of usage:
1. Time
2. Temperature
3. Fitness
4. Music while running/working out
5. Alarms
6. Weather forecast
7. Sports scores
8. Stock prices
9. Timers
10. Turn-by-turn navigation
11. Quick texts (mainly replies, Siri works remarkably well for dictation)
12. Quick news via 3rd party news apps
13. Apple Pay
14. Apple TV Remote
15. Basic email (reading, deleting, marking unread)SEE ALSO:
Apple Watch: Still the leader of a growing smartwatch pack – May 31, 2016
Looking back on a year of wearing an Apple Watch – May 31, 2016
Living with Apple Watch for one year – May 4, 2016
Reasons why I still wear my Apple Watch every day – April 25, 2016
A year with the Apple Watch: What works, what doesn’t, and what lies ahead – April 22, 2016
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
Yawn. Some of us remain deeply unimpressed with the idea of wearing a thick black-faced gadget which is expensive for its limited functionality.
Apple Watch does everythin I have no nterest in doing.
well, maybe if mr. apple would release the sales info the debate would be over, because we would have the facts
Then they would just whine that they’re too low or “missed”, or if they’re really high? They’d redefine the category to make apple look bad. That’s the way it’s been forever. I can understand apple not wanting to release sales figures for those exact reasons.
Couldn’t disagree more. The less transparent Apple is, the more it will be punished by investors, as they should be. Apple only creates suspicions when it denies investors and users accurate guidance. Who would put their money into an emotional/fashion item when the whole point of investing is to support companies that are making what people truly want? Isn’t that already apparent given based on the last year of weak AAPL performance?
they release the sales figures for their other products, and manage to deal with the criticism and redefinition of success or failure, so why not with the watch as well.
and i agree with mike, the less transparent mr. apple is on this issue, the less good it is for the company, both in terms of appearance and our stock investment.
According to your logic Apple should NOT sell any item whose sales can be quantified for fear of public opinion. Then please explain why Apple does NOT withhold sales data for its other products and reserves special treatment for AppleWatch?
The same reason they don’t report sales figures for Apple TV, iPods, accessories, and the rest of the “other” category. If one of those businesses becomes a “tent pole”, then they’ll break out the numbers.
Logically you can’t go from always reporting a products sales figures, to suddenly not reporting it. Which would be the case with the Mac, or iPhone. With the iPod apple gave 6 years warning about putting it into another category, and said plainly that the iPod was no longer a tent pole business, and that every iPhone and iPad sold is also an iPod, so they accurately conditioned the investors and the public to understand that change.
If they had something to cannibalize the Mac, they’d do the same thing eventually.
My logic with not breaking out sales figures for the new business of the watch is simply that they’re damned if they do, and damned if they don’t at this stage. So, for competitive reasons it makes more sense and causes less problems to not break out the numbers. If that calculus changes, then the numbers will be broken out.
After all, no other tech companies are as transparent as Apple is. Amazon doesn’t release sales figures, Samsung doesn’t either. And Microsoft for years cheated by channel stuffing and double counting.
I just think Apple is getting sick of having a double standard when it comes to the scrutiny they receive. Even when they issue accurate guidance for a quarter, no one ever listens to it… I’m sure they’re trying to somewhat mitigate the fud parade.
“Logically you can’t go from always reporting a products sales figures, to suddenly not reporting it.”
Why not?
Apple’s refusal to break out sales figures for what it dubs the “Other” category is just an awkward and confidence-losing way of saying that Apple has a growing basket of products that are stale and/or getting outcompeted in the marketplace.
That is no way to win confidence back for Apple. By not responding to legitimate investor requests for product profitability data, Apple itself is feeding the FUD machine. Release compelling new products, and everyone would be rallying around Apple like they were a decade ago.
It isn’t just about the Apple Watch. It’s about the fact that under Cook, all the Mac hardware and software has degraded relative to the market. Apple has pulled out of markets it used to own, and it has released uninspired new products that just aren’t ever going to gain mass appeal. Apple’s growth in China and Inda, while significant, is actually behind the pace of industry leaders and Apple’s distractions (the spaceship, Dr. Dre, the social agenda, you name it) have delivered nothing positive that any user or investor can hang his hat onto. Apple keeps attempting to bunt instead of swinging for the fences. We shall see at WWDC whether investors and users will have anything to look forward to. My guess is that we won’t, we’ll just hear again from Tim how excited he is about his pipeline. And Cook will certainly cherry pick a whole bunch of exciting numbers to share with the crowd while conveniently ignoring the fact that Apple is falling behind across the map on services, software, and yes, hardware too. Reporting it may be embarrassing for Cook to do, but it’s his company now. He needs to own up to his performance, pronto.
Allow me to clarify on thing further: I am very focused on long-term performance. MDN and Apple fans here seem to think that Cook is a superior strategist playing the long game, but I find his strategy lacking and his short-term tactics (silence on all things except social agenda, architectural masturbation, and fluffy substance-free advertising) is growing old.
Most alarming is that the iOS market is rapidly repeating the Windows-Mac war from the 1990’s. What does Apple do in response? Fragment iOS and fall on their face with the Apple Watch and Apple TV, neither of which have garnered enough traction for Apple to even share sales data for. And what else — oh, a vaporware car. If current course and rumors are true, Cook is well on his way to making Apple another Bang & Olufson, a practically irrelevant electronics maker that puts fashion above all else.
And how in the hell is iOS fragmented? ~90% of customers are on the latest version…. And tvOS and watchOS both run the same code base. Explain?
That’s like saying OS X is fragmented because it runs on a lot of different hardware… Fragmentation refers to different versions of the OS being used simultaneously, like android… But when almost all of your customers are on the latest version it is not fragmented by definition.
Apple can barely manage all the derivative OSes it has in play now:
1. iOS with annoying FORCED BUGGY UPDATES THAT BRICKED MY IPAD
2. tvOS with horrid interface and no valuable must-have content
3 WatchOS forced onto iPhone users whether they want it or not
4. The original great file system, OS X, now struggles on with an antiquated file system, ugly Ives interface, and as much bloat as windows
…. sounds like fragmentation of OS X to me
You completely ignored my first paragraph which explained that next sentence… If you have to take things out of context to support your argument then it’s weak.
It appears that Apple is only reporting sales data for products that excel and buries sales data for products that fail. Apple’s failure to be transparent only breeds rumors.
“…because we would have the facts”
So would the competition, and that’s exactly the reason why Apple said it would not divulge those numbers, even before launching the watch. But hey, why educate ourselves before giving opinions?
That is a STUPID argument. There is competition with almost ALL products.
Too true.
But Apple releases sales data for other products that compete with similar products by other manufactures. Why is AppleWatch sales data kept hidden from the public?
MDN continues to proudly boast of how much money they spent on a wrist remote for their phone, which is in their pocket / on the desk right next to them anyway.
Republishing that list of things that absolutely nobody had any complaint about doing on their phone is so weird.
Not one thing on that list is done measurably better through a $500 wrist remote.
Putting aside the fact that we have a number of individual investors on this site, why the should Apple care about what investors think – especially the Wall Street types? The undertaking and motivation of Apple as an enterprise, cultural icon, and technology powerhouse is not about them and NEVER HAS BEEN. Being an Apple employee means being a part of and taking pride in the creation of great products that will change the world. Nothing more, nothing less.
Wall Street has gone off the rails in the last couple of decades, focusing less on the fundamentals of a company and more on what they think other investors are going to do.
The main problem I have with Tim is that he’s too much of a southern gentleman to tell the stock manipulators to go pound sand.
Southern gentleman, my ass. Cook has tried to play the Wall Street game and has failed to impress them. He has taken on debt, played the tax games and the stock buybacks and outsourced to the max in communist countries. None of that matters because it’s absolutely no different than any other company has done. Refusing to release sales figures on the Apple Watch only underscores the point that it’s not a money maker at all.
To differentiate itself and please all investors, Apple needs to get back to what made it great in the past: superior value products, at or near the cutting edge of technology, that is super reliable with intuitive interfaces that people can trust — and with honest accounting.
In my opinion, the transition point from stellar underdog company that punched above its weight class to corporate gorilla occurred under Jobs when Apple started backdating stock options to unfairly reward executives in ways that other employees were not. Ever since then, we have seen Apple act as just another plodding corporation, rather deaf to user input, not particularly interested in delivering delightful new products to markets where Apple used to lead (education, iTunes, Mac Pro, Mac Mini, XServe, OSX Server, etc) and today rolls out me-too products (Apple Watch, Apple TV) with pretty crappy reliability & GUI and quite bad value too.
So despite all the pro-AW propaganda MDN keeps spewing, others are totally right that it’s a niche product. The AW doesn’t really add enough value to a most people’s lives, its overpriced for what it does, the aesthetic is uninspiring, and most people feel it will never fully replace their iPhones.
That’s not to say that it’s a mistake for Apple to play in the smartwatch market, but I suspect that Apple has been losing a lot of money on it. That’s why Apple decided it needed to push the Ahrendts fashionista angle — because by propping up ASP into jewelry territory, where normally profit margins defy logic, Apple thought it could make up for the development costs. Based solely on my experience in one of the high tech capitals of the planet, it’s abundantly clear that people see it for what it is: not jewelry, but just another overpriced electronic gadget that will soon be obsolete. One more item to recharge and sync and manage.
So as an AAPL investor, I want to know the truth. Can I trust Apple to do a better job in marketing, product development, advertising, and distribution in the future? If Apple won’t tell me, then I will not give Apple more of my money.
And I’m not alone. Apple stock price will rebound only when new Macs and software are revealed that have as good or better value propositions compared to the market as Snow Leopard era units did, and back when one could understand how to use stuff like iTunes without reading Apple support pages to find missing commands (some of which are still missing)!!! Under Cook, investor confidence is dropping rapidly. Impress us in a week at WWDC or buyers and investors will happily go elsewhere with their money. They always do.
Thank god! A smart one in this bunch of Apple-Kissers. Software quality poor, AppleTV v4 nothing spectacular, Apple Watch ho-hum, iTunes still a big mess. Their problems everywhere and no one wants to address it honestly.
I won’t debate you point by point as some of your points are valid and others are out of left field. Suffice it to say, if you don’t have confidence in Apple’s leadership, I strongly suggest you sell the stock and put your mind at ease.
can’t speak for others here, but that’s what I’ve done
There is legitimate reason to criticize Apple for not divulging Watch sales figures. Apple has given their reasons, but that doesn’t cut ice with investors. I get it. Let’s drop that debate a moment to discuss the topic of the article. The question is this: If the estimate 15 million sold is accurate, would that constitute in your opinion a successful product? The point of the article is that by any standard other than iPhone, those sales numbers are great. Who here disagrees, and if so, why?
It’s not just total sales that matter. Apple is a big enough company catering primarily to high-end users, no matter what they release, they are guaranteed to sell several million in the initial stampede of early adopters.
The question is, are other more cost-conscious common people also buying? Apple refuses to say whether sales are growing or shrinking.
To any sane investor, Apple silence is the same thing as Cook admitting that the device is not taking off. Thus, we will probably see them in the discount bin soon.
My experience is that most people in the Apple retail store don’t really enjoy the Apple Watch. It’s an accessory, not the future of computing. And the interface sucks.