Of Course Apple Watch Is Selling Well. Why Wouldn't it?
Every 1 million Watches that are sold is worth about $475 million in revenue… While the direct impact from Watches is small when you look at Apple’s total finances it does add some incremental growth, sells some more iPhones and just as important increases the switching hassles and costs to move off the Apple ecosystem.
If Apple wasn’t so large the Watch would be having a much more meaningful contribution to the company’s financial results. The success of the iPhone hampers the perception of the Watch in multiple ways.
If Apple wasn’t so large the Watch wouldn’t be having any meaningful contribution to the company’s financial results…because nobody would be buying it. There’s no denying the selling power of Apple’s brand, and I’d be hard pressed to accept — but certainly open to hear — any argument that the primary sales impetus of Apple Watch isn’t that it’s an Apple Watch.
Aside from fitness monitoring and its future health potential, Apple Watch isn’t appreciably better than, say, Pebble Time (unless you consider the recent sales that put Apple Watch in the $250 price bracket). And at this point, I honestly think I’d rather own the latter. “Always on” is becoming more and more compelling as “raise to wake” seems to work less and less often, and Siri is rapidly rocketing through the bottom of (what I thought was) the bottom of the barrel.
Apple Watch is a hit. It will continue to be a hit, and in time, its use cases will probably be more relevant. I’m looking forward to that, but I also can’t help but be extra critical about this thing as a first-gen attempt by a computing goliath in 2015. Even as a first-gen product, the smartwatch should have been better, and it should be receiving more a lot more app curation from Cook and company. Instead, the commercial message isn’t really the new platform, it’s just the company name.
Apple can just about sell anything.
But if the company starts believing that, they’re in for a rude awakening.