“Sure, Apple has reportedly sold 2.3 million watches already which will prompt many, including analysts, to hail the launch as an immediate success,” Carly Page writes for The Inquirer. “From a consumers’ perspective, however, the Apple Watch launch couldn’t have been worse.”
“As regular readers of The INQUIRER will probably have guessed, I’d quite like an Apple Watch,” Page writes. “That won’t be possible until at least June, though, as the Apple Watch sold out online in just six hours.”
“Apple had originally promised a 24 April release date, which has since been wiped from its US website, but even those who managed to hit the pre-order button at 08.01 precisely last Friday were greeted with the message that their Watch would ship in four to six weeks. This has since slipped to July and even August for some models,” Page writes. “Surely, Apple being Apple, it should have been aware of the huge demand the Apple Watch was likely to see. And surely, once it had caught on that the Watch would sell in its millions from the get-go, it could have made sure it had enough stock available before it put the gadget on sale. Not enough stock available? Don’t launch it yet.”
Page writes, “The decision to go ahead with the launch, despite a lack of stock, appears to many that the cracks in the company are starting to show, and it tarnishes Apple’s long-held reputation for the excellence of its product launches.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple began the “launch” of the Apple Watch on September 9, 2014 in order to freeze the market for Christmas 2014. No sense having people buy random stupidwatches that might delay their first Apple Watch purchase unnecessarily while lining the pockets of the stupidwatch peddlers (Samsung, Motorola, etc.). We do not know that Apple knew it lacked stock. Cook obviously though he’d have sufficient supply by late April/early May. Either demand has significantly exceeded Apple’s expectations or there are some unforeseen production yield issues for some Apple Watch component(s) that have cropped up very recently or both.
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