As you consider whether or not to purchase an Apple Watch before it finally arrives this March, it’s helpful to see what other people are saying about it, and to determine how many others are going to take the plunge and buy one. After all, it’s only human nature to want to be part of a movement that many others belong to. Nobody wants to be a putz by being the only one to buy into a certain technology. If the Apple Watch is going to be a flop, you certainly don’t want to be any part of it.
It Depends On What You Mean By “Flop”
Well, we can tell you with some certainty that if you do decide to take the leap onto the Apple Watch train, you won’t be alone. You will be an owner of the best-selling smartwatch in history. This much is certain. So can the best-selling smartwatch in history ever be considered a flop? It kind of depends on the spin.
The Apple Watch will be the best-selling smartwatch in history because other smartwatches have sold so poorly up to this point. If you exclude fitness bands and all the other wearables that don’t look like traditional watches, there have only been about 2 million smartwatches sold worldwide, ever.
Now, Apple is talking about shipping 24 million Apple Watches this year. Many analysts are saying that Apple is being far too ambitious, and that they are only likely to sell 10 million units. In the eyes of the beancounters, that is a flop. But selling five times more smartwatches in one year than have ever been sold before surely can’t be seen as a failure. It ought to be seen as the beginning of the new era of wearable technology.
There is a certain inevitability about the success of Apple Watch, despite the fact that smartwatches have yet to prove themselves as a vital market segment. As we have discussed in the past, only a small percentage of iPhone owners need to come aboard in order to reach 10 million Apple Watch sales. Furthermore, Apple has decided to play it cagey, and lump Apple Watch sales figures in with iPhones and iPads, so that we won’t ever get an official sales tally.
By and large, industry and analysts acknowledge the technological juggernaut that is Apple, and they accept the inevitability of Apple selling millions of Apple Watch units on the basis of the brand name alone. Of course, there are plenty of naysayers who say that the Apple Watch will never hit critical mass in the marketplace, but there are clearly not as many of them as there were last Fall when Apple made its first announcement that the Apple Watch was coming.
Plenty of Apple Watch Critics Remain
Many of the critics remain negative about the utility of smartwatches in general, conceding that while Apple may be the one to do it best, there still remains no “killer app” or crying need for a smartwatch in the first place. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson made quite a bit of noise recently by predicting the Apple Watch will be a flop. Wilson, who backed companies like Twitter and Zynga at very early stages, said in a blog post that the Apple Watch “will not be the home-run product that iPod, iPhone, and iPad have been.”
“Not everyone will want to wear a computer on their wrist. Eventually, this market will be realized as the personal mesh/personal cloud, but the focus on wearables will be a bit of a head fake and take up a lot of time, energy, and money in 2015 with not a lot of results.”
Commentator Wayne Williams argued recently in betanews that no smartwatch can replace the style of a high-end wristwatch, and that the convenience value that the Apple Watch adds doesn’t justify replacing his fine timepiece. He suggested that smart watchbands may be the way to best combine the new technology with the old.
Economist Max Wolff recently told CNBC that he didn’t think that the Apple Watch would perform well on the market, and that while Apple will still thrive because of the iPhone, the Apple Watch “is not going to drive anything other than some gravitas, some bragging rights and a big push back on this sort of unfortunate belief … that Apple has lost some of its mojo when it comes to innovation and disruption.”
Quentin Fortrell of Market Watch made waves recently by arguing that the Apple Watch was proof that “Apple was running out of ideas”, and that the Apple Watch was just “a riff on existing smartwatches, such as Samsung’s Gear S.” Fortrell may be wrong in that there are lots of ways in which Apple has differentiated its smartwatch from Samsung’s product. But he’s certainly not alone in suggesting that the smartwatch industry as a whole hasn’t made a convincing enough argument that we need one of these devices in the first place.