“Few analysts or writers will outright say it, but I will: the Apple Watch is going to flop,” Mark Wilson writes for Fast Company. “And I bet a lot of other people are thinking the same thing for many good reasons.”
“The Apple Watch is Jonathan Ive’s Newton,” Wilson writes. “When I look at the Apple Watch, I’m not seeing an empathetic creation for the masses. I’m seeing what the New Yorker’s more than 16,000-word story on Jonathan Ive would only hint at—that Apple may have built out the watch to satisfy the urges of a designer who has become more obsessed with Bentleys and Rolexes than making attractive, functional technology that will actually make life better for the 99%.”
“The Newton, Apple’s original, failed tablet, didn’t sell because tablet technology wasn’t polished, and we didn’t have the wireless networking infrastructure to make its experience particularly meaningful,” Wilson writes. “Sound familiar?”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: When we entered this one, iCal quivered with anticipation.
[Thanks to Sonny Dickson via Twitter.]
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NYT claims Apple has tough job trying to sell Apple Watch to ‘an uninterested public’ or something – February 28, 2015
Vogue Paris: Apple Watch is a ‘revolution’ – February 27, 2015
The Apple Watch is about to change everything – February 26, 2015
Analyst: 100,000 Apple Watch apps in App Store by April 10th; 42 million Watches sold by year end – February 24, 2015
Apple Watch, the world’s first real smart watch, will be a massive hit – September 9, 2014
He’s comparing it to the Newton? The Newton’s failure had very little to do with the technology at the time. The greater population was just not ready for that type of “personal digital assistant”. It was ahead of its time.
I am suing for patent infringement
I love MDN’s take: “iCal quivered with anticipation.” 😀
Hope he is going to resign if it is a sucess!!!
Mark Wilson you taking note lol
Oh my he does finally put some reasoning into the drivel:
“It’s a potentially promising form that’s being built about 10 years before Apple has the technology or infrastructure to pull it off in a meaningful way.”
Plus the battery problem and the subsequent removal of sensors.
“It’s just a time coffin that lives on your wrist.” Gee that sounds like a market for every zombied jouranalist and analyst out there, and goodness knows that there are so many of them.
Let’s get to the chase.
“So I ask you, even if the Apple Watch as it’s designed today were to sell 50 or 100 million units, will your lives be any better for it?” Yes it will. You can i’Cal me on that.
“And if not, what does that say about how Apple is designing our tomorrow?” If not, if the is a flop, it’s not the end of the world. It’s a step to getting an watch that will have a longer battery, and the infrastructure will evolved. The first cars could not hit 100 km/hour and there was no road infrastructure to say of. Yet they were built, many flopped but they kept on trucking.
Here’s a question for you Mark Wilson….
How do you sleep at night?
Some tech wrtiters suffer from a form of obsessive–compulsive personality disorder (OCPD), where they have an obsessive urge to repeatedly predict doom for Apple products. They also suffer from terminal stupidity.
How stupid do you have to be to compare the total lack of an ecosystem which is yes, in its infancy and indeed in some areas still borderline efficient, but it’s all reach for the sky from this point on as it was with iPod, iPad and iPhone that flew from what was initially simply core adequacy but not the wasteland that was sadly the home of the Newton that was simply asking far too much of the available tech and would do so for at least a decade. Good designers are those who can tell the difference, hacks and analysts just come along for the ride and simply guess like a scattergun.
Some day in the far future we will come to believe that nay-saying is deeply valuable. Alternative ideas will make is think, then we’ll be grateful for the opportunity to have seen from another point of view, then we’ll make a judgment and go on with our day. The negative voice won’t have angered us and its author won’t be offended we didn’t agree.
But not today. Today it’s all pitchforks and torches.
Whatever, it will be some time – maybe 6 or 12 months to know if it is a “breakthrough” product.
Certainly the first batches will fly off the shelves becuase of the sheer volume of mac eco-system users.
I dont see them losing money or recouping the R&D, but can they sell them in iPad volumes is the question.
Can you provide these quotes from supermodels and celebrities. Because I couldn’t find any. Plus Apple Watch starts at $349, doesn’t that cover the 99%?
“[Rather] than making attractive, functional technology that will actually make life better for the 99%.”
Ya know, as beyond belief as most of this article is, I see a glimmer of fact with the above statement. This is underscored by the (so far) PR we’ve seen, which has been ads in elite fashion magazines and quotes from supermodels and celebrities. Apple products have never been common denominator, but the lift towards an anticipated higher income customer is uncomfortable, to me personally, at least.
When Jobs presented the iphone, I knew it would be a smashing hit.
When Cook pulled out the watch, I was thinking this would be a flop and I still hold on to that belief.
Oh sure, there will be lots of people in line for it but I think after a month of use, it would quietly be placed in your drawer.
“satisfy the urges of a designer…. not a creation for the masses”
Steve Jobs would have said that is exactly Apple’s philosophy.
Companies who create guided by the mantra ‘for the masses’ are like those guys who kept building phones with keyboards as the focus groups and polls show the masses wanted them ….
Hopefully the watch won’t become a burden, like Bluetooth headsets. Started off strong, but not many in use these days.
Mark Wilson is clearly a pen name used by John “No Evidence” Dvorak.
This guy’s a dipwad. 150 years ago he would have announced that trains made no sense because there weren’t tracks going everywhere. The infrastructure for this watch is much farther along than when the Newton was for sale. Apple has the financial ability to do what it wants with the watch, and there’s no better company to take that on than Apple. It’s part of the new infrastructure of what he calls the Disney watch world. If Apple executes this the way I think they can, they’ll help create that world for the 99% this bozo thinks will be left out.