The recent introduction of the Apple Watch didn’t stir as much attention as Apple may have wished, but the company did sell out all the watches they had manufactured for launch day. And there is no question that the new tech gizmo will be a financial success. Investment firm J.P. Morgan has told investors it expects Apple to sell 26.3 million units before the end of calendar 2015.
Like the legions of smartwatches that came before, however, today’s generation will ultimately fail to grab the imagination — or the wallets — of the public.
Since Chester Gould first introduced the radiotelephone watch in his Dick Tracy comic strip some 80 years ago, geeks like me have lusted after a watch that does more than just tell time. Somewhere in a desk drawer I still have my first model, one of the Timex DataLink watches from 1994. There was also a brief model from Microsoft named SPOT. The concept of a multi-tasking wrist watch was given new life in the James Bond movies, beginning with the Rolex Submariner Sean Connery wore as 007 in From Russia With Love. Albeit with a few enhancements from the Secret Service armorer Q.
In this decade we have seen the introduction of the smartwatch, some versions of which offer portable media players, with FM radio, audio, and video files via a Bluetooth headset, telephone capabilities, cameras, thermometer, altimeter, barometer, compass, calculator, GPS navigation, maps, speakers, activity monitors and more.
There are a number of weaknesses in the Apple Watch that will give pause to even the most fervent of Apple advocates. The CNet review notes that the watch has a dreadfully short battery life, slow recharging time, substantially higher price than competitive smartwatches, and must be paired with an iPhone to work. But these drawbacks won’t be enough to keep the legions of fans and early adopters to shelling out the $350 to $17,000 the watch costs.
The problem more specifically is with smartwatches in general:
- Who wears a wrist watch anymore? Not the under-30’s, who have generally abandoned watches both as timepieces and as fashion accessories. They get their time from their cell phones. This does not portend strong growth in watch sales in the future.
- It does not solve a problem. In some versions, the smartwatch could replace the time and distance sports watches used by runners, but there are watches specifically designed for that purpose. What’s the point in a $350 watch that can do little more than replace a $35 watch?
- Smartwatches already suffer from sluggish sales. Apple’s announcement of their wrist accessory may have impacted sales of smartphones from Samsung and others, but those were already sluggish, even at a lower price.
- It’s just another gadget. Another gadget that will run out of battery life by the end of the day, another gadget that needs to be charged, and another gadget that cannot do anything but tell time unless it is tied to a smartphone.
- No one asked for them. With Google, Microsoft, Apple and Samsung already diving into the smartphone market, it might seem that there is enough industry buzz to push these devices to new versions and evolutionary improvements. But smartwatches are a tough sell in a tech market in which no one demanded these wearable products to begin with.
So Apple has dipped its toe into the market for tech wearables, and likely will not lose any money on the venture. But is the smartwatch really the Next Big Thing in technology, or simply another device to join the ranks of the Segway, the Apple Newton, and Microsoft’s Bob.
What remains to be seen is how the rest of the wearables revolution will fare. Have you bought into Google Glass yet?
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James Bond: You see, sir. By pulling out this button, it turns the watch into a hyper-intensified magnetic field. Powerful enough to even deflect the path of a bullet – at long range, or so Q claims…
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Tags: Small Business, Technology
