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Apple Watch sales up over 50% since last year

techcrunch.com

131–140 of 275 posts

Re: Apple Watch sales up over 50% since last year

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Them being dumb watches is the appeal though. A good "dumb" watch will last decades. An Apple Watch is obsolete after, what, two years? I wear a battery-powered analog quartz dumb watch on my wrist and I love it. I change the battery every couple years and that's it. It tells perfectly accurate time (way more accurate than a mechanical watch costing orders of magnitude more) and will never be obsolete.

I think an obsolete apple watch will still be able to at least mirror the functionality of any 'dumb' watch.

Not true at all. The battery isn't replaceable, other parts are more likely to break, and it's not clear to me that the Apple Watch even has a high quality quartz crystal inside it for accurate time-keeping. It might simply be grabbing the time off the linked cell phone, which grabs the time off the cell network. Do Apple Watches work well independently of linked phones for months on end? Years? Because that'll be necessary if you want to keep using one decades down the line long after they're no longer supported by whatever phone replacements have come down the line next.

Re: Apple Watch sales up over 50% since last year

#132
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Them being dumb watches is the appeal though. A good "dumb" watch will last decades. An Apple Watch is obsolete after, what, two years? I wear a battery-powered analog quartz dumb watch on my wrist and I love it. I change the battery every couple years and that's it. It tells perfectly accurate time (way more accurate than a mechanical watch costing orders of magnitude more) and will never be obsolete.

I backed the first and every subsequent Pebble KickStarter. When they sold out to Garmin* and refunded my last order/pledge, I spent _some_ of that refund on a 1957 Russian Kirovskie Sputnik Commemorative mechanical watch. I know none of my Pebbles or any Apple Watch is going to still be keeping good time 70 years from now... (it gains just under a minute a day - resetting it off my phone's clock when I wind it in th…

How is the Apple Watch that inaccurate? Does it not have a quartz crystal in it? Even mediocre mechanical watches do better than a minute per day.

Re: Apple Watch sales up over 50% since last year

#133
post #130
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The jobs the watch will do aren't as clear cut as it was for the iPod. The iPod let you listen to music and carried lots of (or all of) your music and had software that made it easy to convert and manage your digital music and buy more over the internet. Those were things basically everyone wanted and it did that better than competitors. The watch? Well yeah it tells time, but it's worse at that then most watches and…

The one thing most people dont realize about why the iPod was popular was because it was actually the fastest device to transfer music to. At the time, music devices were using serial connections if you can believe that, and FireWire was the fastest thing on the market, only available with iPods. This, combined with having the most space (10gb vs 256 mb), combined with windows support on the third version, made the i…

At the time, music devices were using serial connections if you can believe that, and FireWire was the fastest thing on the market, only available with iPods.

Can't remember that. Mine had usb, was available before iPod and the speed never bothered me.

Re: Apple Watch sales up over 50% since last year

#134
post #92
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The jobs the watch will do aren't as clear cut as it was for the iPod. The iPod let you listen to music and carried lots of (or all of) your music and had software that made it easy to convert and manage your digital music and buy more over the internet. Those were things basically everyone wanted and it did that better than competitors. The watch? Well yeah it tells time, but it's worse at that then most watches and…

I think the health tracking features are the major differentiating feature for wearables. Fit people want to track their exercise and stay fit and the unfit (for the most part) want to get fit. These two groups are 99% of the population. And, as we're finding in the 21st century/age of plenty, fitness takes some work. This thread alone indicates wearable can be a big motivator for fitness. In addition, the health tra…

"Wearable Fitness Devices Don’t Seem to Make You Fitter"

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/upshot/wearable-fitness-d...

Re: Apple Watch sales up over 50% since last year

#135

Personal anecdote: I bought an Apple Watch early and didn't really know what to do with it. It wasn't until I fell off my bike and broke it did I realize how much more exercise I was getting with it. I bought another one soon after.

> It wasn't until I fell off my bike and broke it did I realize how much more exercise I was getting with it. How does that relate?

The last watch he/she had, got broken when they broke a stool and fell over at McDonalds.

Re: Apple Watch sales up over 50% since last year

#136
I unconsciously love my Watch. The battery life has improved MASSIVELY since Gen1, the fitness stuff is groovy, being able to control music is handy, alarms and notifications are brilliant.

Just being able to not take my phone with me when I go for a (admittedly half-arsed) run, is worth the price of admission.

Re: Apple Watch sales up over 50% since last year

#137

I’ve been saying it all along: to understand the Apple Watch, look to the iPod. The first three years of iPod sales were minuscule compared to the following ten: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_qua... The two products occupy a very similar space of affordable luxury; they are not world-changing like the Mac or iPhone, but category-defining. Through gradual iteration and segmentation, Apple sl…

They are looking better. Or, maybe I'm giving into the design?

That said, I see so many for sale on CL.

The iPod was revolutionary because it took all that stolen music, and put it on a very slick device. I don't see the comparison. Plus, we were all sitting around with so much music on our hard drives. Being able to listen to music while outside was great. Hell--I even miss the original ITunes.

I'm a big watch guy, and considered buying a broken iwatch. I would never walk into a Apple Store and buy new, but might but a broken one, or an older one, but for no more than a C note.

Re: Apple Watch sales up over 50% since last year

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple may not care too much about that. As long as they get sold.

There care as much as how it affects the sales of their next ones

They’re selling more this year than last, so either there not collecting dust or it doesn’t matter that they are. I’d lean towards the former.

Re: Apple Watch sales up over 50% since last year

#139
post #23

My big question is: what do people do with theirs? Other than notifications and fitness tracking, I'm struggling to think of a use case for owning one.

I built an app for it to track my weight lifting (not aware of a Fitbit or Garmin that does that).

https://www.rikerapp.com

Re: Apple Watch sales up over 50% since last year

#140
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I backed the first and every subsequent Pebble KickStarter. When they sold out to Garmin* and refunded my last order/pledge, I spent _some_ of that refund on a 1957 Russian Kirovskie Sputnik Commemorative mechanical watch. I know none of my Pebbles or any Apple Watch is going to still be keeping good time 70 years from now... (it gains just under a minute a day - resetting it off my phone's clock when I wind it in th…

How is the Apple Watch that inaccurate? Does it not have a quartz crystal in it? Even mediocre mechanical watches do better than a minute per day.

No no - my 70 year old Russian mechanical watch is "that inaccurate"... (My Pebble's, and presumably the Apple Watch, sync themselves from what I assume is one of or some combination of ntp time, GSM/LTE time, or GPS time - from the phone they're paired with...)
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