“The Apple Watch was expected to be a disaster for companies like Fitbit,” Joshua Brustein reports for Bloomberg. “It hasn’t been. While Fitbit’s sales dipped as anticipation for Apple’s smartwatch grew, the company has bounced back this spring and appears to be doing just fine, according to data provided exclusively to Bloomberg by Slice Intelligence.”
“It could be that it is simply too early for the Apple Watch to have cut into Fitbit’s business. Apple hasn’t released any official numbers or expectations for Apple Watch sales, and analyst forecasts are all over the place,” Brustein reports. “There’s still skepticism from many quarters about whether smartwatches and fitness bands will ever go mainstream. Apple optimists think that it is supply, not demand, that is limiting sales.”
MacDailyNews Take: Forget “Apple optimists,” you merely have to be semi-sane in order to understand implicitly that without supply, there can’t be sales. Apple Watch is the mother of all supply/demand imbalances.
“In April, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook acknowledged that demand was greater than supply, and said the company was working to remedy that,” Brustein reports. “It could be that the devices will eat Fitbit’s lunch once Apple’s supply chain starts humming along.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Gee, ya think? This one is negatively slanted against Apple throughout.
SEE ALSO:
Morgan Stanley soundly refutes KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo’s Apple Watch demand claim – May 21, 2015
Morgan Stanley: Apple Watch demand up 60% in US since March – May 21, 2015
Or there may be plenty of people who like the simplicity of a Fitbit, who don’t use their iPhone so busily as to need an accessory Watch.
Yeah, and I thought all I needed was for my phone to also be an iPod. Boy was I wrong! I use my iPhone for *everything* now!
Agreed. If FitBit’s features are what you want, they’re accessible by buying a FitBit or any of a number of competing products at less than half the cost of an Apple watch.
It is not a FitBit competitor any more than it’s a Swatch competitor. It’s a wearable feature accessory to iPhone. At the moment, its features are still limited enough to make it overpriced (in my opinion). It does nothing that can’t be done by something else, and for less money.
This was the case of the first-gen iPhone, also. The UI was game-changing but beyond that, it lacked compelling features versus its less-user-friendly competitors.
The “killer app” will make Apple Watch, and there is not one. I suspect Apple knows this and low supply/demand is intentional. Either they are waiting for the app to come, or they know exactly what it is and are waiting for it to be ready.
Name one product that does everything the watch does for less? No one is going to wear multiple items on their wrist. My Apple Watch does a lot of things to make my day easier. The killer apps are Hey Siri and Apple Pay. It is not an overpriced watch. There are many dumb watches made out of the same materials as the Apple Watch that cost as much or more. Are those watches “overpriced”?
The iPhone does *nearly* everything the watch does, for between $350 and $14,000 less. Exceptions at this time are the haptic features and the heartrate monitoring, which could be added using something like Fitbit for less than the watch, and the battery lasts longer.
Apple Pay and Siri are presumably a bit more convenient from the wrist, but the price at this time doesn’t come close to justified for me or the overwhelming majority of other Apple product users I’ve been in contact with.
It’s a move into a market (wearable) that just doesn’t have a thing most people are willing to pay for yet. Fabricating a supply pinch lets the market continue to be small without having to say it out loud.
The question is whether Apple launched the product and hopes someone will come up with a compelling use for it (not a good color on them), or if they HAVE a compelling use for it that they’re waiting to show us (a much better color on them, extremely Jobsian).
Time will tell. If no “killer app” emerges in the first year, I’d guess the Watch will die on the vine.
Not for me.. Returning mine. Mail doesn’t stay sync’d, battery life is horrible and seems it is also horribly affective my iPhone 6 Plus battery. I’m not impressed right now with the watch.
The Apple Watch isn’t going to kill anything.
It’s a pointless product whose features can be had in multiple devices for free, or for a fraction of what the Apple Watch’s price is.
No competitors should be worried. I have never seen a more ridiculously priced item that brings zero value to the table.
we (didn’t) miss you Organdy, so pretty in pink.
Please see my comment above and be educated.
orandy, if you “have never seen a more ridiculously priced item that brings zero value to the table” then you are truly disconnected from the real world. Quit focusing on the gold Apple Watch Edition and consider the $349/$399 Apple Watch Sport. It is an incredible piece of wearable equipment for the price.
Your worthless hyperbole undermines your already weak arguments.
well since you still can’t walk into an Apple store and buy a watch – they really aren’t available. they will blow out when you can go into the store and walk out with it. In NYC you still have to buy it online. I know a lot of people waiting for that to change – including myself
Exactly. When it’s in stock (all models) then revisit the story… But it’s on to get the damn things.
Apple is (still) intentionally limiting supply. After WatchOS 2 is released, Apple turns up production to FULL. Early sales to the tech-savy Apple-friendly early adopters (and developers), who can provide feedback and report issues constructively. Mainstream sales after Watch OS 2 comes pre-installed from the factory (and there are more apps in the store), just in time for Apple Watch’s first holiday quarter. And to be sold alongside the latest and greatest iPhones. That’s when most of the Apple Watch’s for 2015 will be sold AND delivered.
Can you sweat all over an Apple Watch? Can you wash it? That would be the only thing I can think of that might make a plastic watch more popular. Or maybe with the fitbit it is so simple and if that’s all you want why spring for more? I don’t know. I don’t wear a watch but I sure like the technology.
Apparently, you can take a shower and go swimming with Apple Watch on, although the “sensing” features become unreliable while submerged.
I’ve got it on while outside building a fountain. No problem, but I do put on a sport band instead of my link or leather band. The watch is extremely versatile.
WARNING
Wearing an Apple Watch leads to limp wrist disorder.
Disease progresses quickly to ultra-liberlism and compete loss of all intelligence.
Read the fine print on the box folks.
Not sure what “ultra-liberlism” is but I do know what a Jackass is.
You be the jackass mentioned above just in case you don’t get it.
Apples to oranges. These products are quite different. Fit-bit is smaller, lighter, cheaper and much more limited in its functions. It also has longer battery life and can be used for sleep tracking. But if thats all you need, by all means get one- its a solid product.
Agreed. Apple watch is a completely different product.
FitBit works great for my wife: it counts steps, shows heart rate, and buzzes when her iPhone rings. That’s all she wants. I have Watch, and I am very happy with it. I don’t really care about steps or heart rate, but it alerts me about calls, texts and appointments. My iPhone is silenced, but now I don’t miss any alert. Different people have different needs; however, people’s needs change: my wife didn’t need an iPhone for years, but you couldn’t pry it out of her hands now!
I seem to recall that Blackberry sales were fine right after iPhone’s release.
Give the Watch a couple years….
A Fitbit costs about $100. The Watch starts at $350. Other than the fact that they do a few of the same things, they are not really comparable at all at this point. Maybe in a few years…
I bought a FitBit last December. I found it cumbersome and challenging to use. Too many issues… Opaque, your’e never sure what you’re doing without checking the phone… Perhaps if I had bought one of the more expensive models, but I bought one of the $100 models (on sale for 25% off)
All that said, it stopped working a month or two after I had it… FitBit sent me a new one, but by that point I lost interest.
Compared to the AppleWatch… The AppleWatch has many more functions and uses… and its exercise metrics are more rigorous… The whole “step-counting” myth has basically been debunked for years.