“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.]