Early Days
To be fair, the smartwatch category (which I separate from the more focused fitness band category, despite some functional overlap) took off, relatively speaking, last year after Apple entered the game. While the secretive giant doesn’t release Apple Watch sales figures, a report issued last week by the British research firm Juniper claims Apple accounted for over half of the 17 million or so smartwatches it says were sold last year, even though it was only in the market for three-quarters of the year.
By contrast, it said that competing watches using Android Wear — Google’s wearable software platform — held less than a 10 percent share. (Samsung, which primarily uses Android in its phones, uses its own operating system, Tizen, in its latest watches.)
Apple’s smash-hit products have always required some time to become huge.
If Apple did indeed sell about 8 million or 9 million smartwatches last year, that would be far fewer than some frothy analysts predicted, and of little financial consequence to the company.
But people do forget that Apple’s smash-hit products have always required some time to become huge. For instance, the iPod was introduced in 2001, but didn’t really take off until its third generation in 2003-2004.
And new smartwatches are coming. Apple will, sooner or later, have a second generation — maybe this year. And I don’t expect the Android Wear companies or Samsung to quit. Like Apple, they are all struggling to make their case to the mass market.
So maybe I’m too impatient. But, to quote Juniper, there’s a “continued lack of a strong use case for smartwatches.”
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