“Few tech products are as polarising as the Apple Watch,” Tim Bradshaw reports for The Financial Times. “Even before it was revealed in September 2014, it has divided consumers, investors and tech pundits alike.”
“Apple’s refusal to reveal Watch sales figures has only fuelled the argument,” Bradshaw reports. “On Tuesday, Apple finally took its first steps towards revealing the Watch’s performance by indicating that total sales for its ‘wearable’ products exceeded $5bn over the past 12 months.”
“Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, told analysts on Tuesday’s earnings call that revenue from ‘wearable products,’ including Apple Watch and its headphones, Beats and AirPods, ‘in the past four quarters was the size of a Fortune 500 company,'” Bradshaw reports. “Watch revenues are included in Apple’s ‘other products’ category, with the declining iPod, Apple TV box and various accessories, where sales in the March quarter grew 31 per cent year on year to $2.9bn.”
“With Mr Cook adding later that its wearables business would be ‘well into the Fortune 500,’ analysts have assumed that the ad hoc division is turning over close to $6bn a year, including Watch sales of more than 3m units in the past quarter alone,” Bradshaw reports. “Gene Munster, the former Apple analyst turned tech investor at Loup Ventures, estimates that of the $6bn total, about $4.7bn came from the Watch. ‘It’s a good reminder that this is a real business,’ he says.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: When Apple Watch gets its own cellular capability and can communicate without iPhone, sales will shift into overdrive. (Apple Watch will always require an iPhone for certain things because the screen is just too small. For example, you’ll always want your iPhone to read larger articles, attachments, see images as prompted by your Watch, as it works today).
We really want to be able to get/make a call in case of emergency while on a run. Right now, with our Apple Watch Nike+ units, we have everything else we need on our wrist during a run (music, GPS, run tracking, heart rate, etc.) except cellular connectivity.
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