Apple Watch in Trouble, Says the Good Ol' Internet

Forbes speculates that the Apple Watch is declining.

First, let me say that linking to a typical sensationalist Forbes article is probably not going to happen on this blog very often, but there are echoes here of others who question how successful the Apple Watch has been, and so I think this merits some thought.

The gist of this article is that since Apple is offering a program in some San Francisco and Boston area stores to buy an Apple Watch with an iPhone and get a $50 overall discount, things are going badly. Moreover, since Apple is not breaking out sales figures for the watch, this is a sign that they are hiding this bad news somehow:

Tim Cook won’t offer exact sales figures because the only insights competitors will glean is that if Apple has failed to ignite consumer demand with a halo product, then they surely can’t with a rival offering.

Apple has always said, even before they sold a single unit, that they would not be breaking out sales figures for Apple Watch. Let’s admit, though, that the watch is not going to light the world on fire as the iPhone has. It is never going to be that kind of blockbuster product, at least in its current incarnation. But there is not much analysis or real numbers in this Forbes piece:

Interest in wearables in general is declining. A report by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech in August this year reversed the notion that Apple Watch and wearable tech are extremely popular with the finding that only 3 percent of the U.S. population age 16 and older owns a smartwatch or smart fitness band. This is also in line with previous Gartner IT predictions that the market would slow in 2015 owing to conflicts between different types of fitness bands and because smartwatches offer the same functions.

Well, let’s do that same “analysis” for the PC industry, which declined in the past quarter – as it has in the past several quarters – while Apple’s Mac sales increased this past quarter by almost ten percent, and in each of the past several quarters by varying rates. If Apple didn’t break out Mac sales separately, I wonder if the same people in a tizzy about watch sales would be saying similar things based on looking at the overall PC industry trend. Or, on a slightly different plane but still squarely in the realm of speculation, let’s predict Apple’s chances in the mobile phone industry in 2007 based on the existing landscape of other products. That would have surely predicted an iPhone flop. And in fact, that was predicted by many.

Sometimes we don’t have enough data to do a good analysis. And for the Apple Watch, that’s the situation. Trying to fill in the blanks only with speculation can be interesting, but that doesn’t make it valid.

Categories    Apple