Apple’s wearables business, which includes the Apple Watch and AirPods, are expected to show massive growth for the 2019 holiday quarter and are obviously a big opportunity for the company.
Even though the Apple story has been tied to services for the last couple of years, a lot of the attention has actually shifted to the company’s wearables business, which includes AirPods, Apple Watch and the lineup of Beats headphones.
Besides the iPhone, AirPods appear to be Apple’s smash hit of the holiday shopping season… “We believe consensus is under appreciating the Apple Watch and Apple AirPods demand strength and Apple’s wearables segment is likely to surpass $10 billion of quarterly sales this quarter,” Citi analysts wrote in a research note on Dec. 23. “Yes we agree with consensus that generally believes Apple’s services will continue to grow and help margins, but we believe consensus is overlooking the wearable’s segment.”
Assuming Citi’s $10 billion estimate for the holiday quarter is close to correct, Apple could report about $27 billion in wearables and accessory sales for the full calendar year of 2019. (We’ll get the exact answer when Apple reports earnings on Jan. 28.) To put that in perspective, that’s nearly seven times the $4 billion or so Twitter expects to report for the same time period…
AirPods and the Apple Watch are huge successes for the company, and offer a better lock-in to Apple’s ecosystem than any of the company’s digital services… And while you can technically use AirPods with an Android phone, the best experience is on the iPhone, increasing the chances that people will continue to upgrade to a new iPhone when they’re ready for one.
MacDailyNews Take: You know, because Apple has had “no new blockbusters.”
It would be nice if iPhones sales, Services and wearable sales were all working well for Apple. That would be the perfect storm needed to remove Apple from the doomed company category. Maybe Apple will no longer be valued as a steel mill going out of business. I wasn’t sure I was ever going to see that day, but maybe I will, after all.