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Apple Watch sales up over 50% since last year

techcrunch.com

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

#221

Post by criddell »

theGimp wrote: post #123
criddell wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to wear a watch, so I kind of wish I could get a fitness tracker (with heart rate monitor) that doesn't have a clock on it. I sometimes wear a watch and a fitbit and that just looks stupid.

If you don't mind wearing a big fitness tracker, the Fitbit Blaze has been great in my experience. It's a bit old now, and the new bigger fitbits are the Surge and the Charge 2, but I still love my Blaze.

The Blaze still has a clock though, as far as I can tell.

I have a (very modest) collection of watches that I enjoy wearing but I also like the data collection of a Fitbit.

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

#222

Post by brlewis »

Pxtl wrote: post #214
aetherson wrote: post #194

I don't have a lot of use for the Apple watch myself, but it's been great for my wife. She, like a lot of women, regularly wears clothing without pockets that can hold her phone, and puts her phone in her purse. Having your phone in your purse radically changes the value of the watch. She used to often miss notifications, and sometimes calls, that she couldn't hear or feel. And even if she did notice them, digging yo…

That comes back to my core opinion on smart watches: notifications are the core. Everything else is feature creep. Imagine shopping for Bluetooth headsets - do you want one with biometrics and a backup radio antenna and a microSD slot for playing music without its phone, and a one-day battery? Or do you want a good quality mic and earphones with a solid Bluetooth connection, and a week-long battery for light use? I w…

Bluetooth notification watch sounds like Fitbit Blaze. Pebble's strengths IMHO were developer friendliness and always-on display.

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

#223

Post by Kluny »

mortenjorck wrote: post #28

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…

Thanks for reminding me I can't get a full sized ipod classic anymore. It burns. :(

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

#224

Post by damontal »

Kluny wrote: post #223
mortenjorck wrote: post #28

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…

Thanks for reminding me I can't get a full sized ipod classic anymore. It burns. :(

i still have one but have no idea what to use it for. google play on my phone + sonos satisfies all of my music needs.

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

#225

Post by dragonwriter »

theGimp wrote: post #123
criddell wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to wear a watch, so I kind of wish I could get a fitness tracker (with heart rate monitor) that doesn't have a clock on it. I sometimes wear a watch and a fitbit and that just looks stupid.

If you don't mind wearing a big fitness tracker, the Fitbit Blaze has been great in my experience. It's a bit old now, and the new bigger fitbits are the Surge and the Charge 2, but I still love my Blaze.

> the new bigger fitbits are the Surge and the Charge 2, but I still love my Blaze.

The Blaze is newer than the Surge; it's basically a Surge with a color screen and the face detachable from the band (which is much better for charging, as well as making replacing the band practical) but without independent GPS (which means if you want to do run tracking without carrying a phone, the Surge still has an advantage.)

The Charge 2, IIRC, replaced the Charge about the same time as the Blaze was introduced, it's basically the next tier down from the Surge/Blaze.

(Current Blaze and former Surge and before that Flex user.)

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

#226

Post by melling »

Steko wrote: post #83
mortenjorck wrote: post #28

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…

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'm pretty sure that I answered this 2 years ago:

https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/07/28/in-the-future-everyo...

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

#227

Post by Pxtl »

brlewis wrote: post #222
Pxtl wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That comes back to my core opinion on smart watches: notifications are the core. Everything else is feature creep. Imagine shopping for Bluetooth headsets - do you want one with biometrics and a backup radio antenna and a microSD slot for playing music without its phone, and a one-day battery? Or do you want a good quality mic and earphones with a solid Bluetooth connection, and a week-long battery for light use? I w…

Bluetooth notification watch sounds like Fitbit Blaze. Pebble's strengths IMHO were developer friendliness and always-on display.

Always-on display should be a given. It's a watch. Anything where I have to think about turning on the display fails to be a watch.

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

#228

Post by Mahn »

onion2k wrote: post #162
Mahn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wear a fitness tracker. If I'm gonna wear something on my wrist, it ought to do something that my phone doesn't, otherwise it's hard to justify the cost.

Your phone almost certainly has all the functions that your fitness tracker has - the advantage is that you don't always have your phone on your person. The same is true of a smartwatch - you get the some of the functionality of your phone without needing to have your phone on you.

> Your phone almost certainly has all the functions that your fitness tracker has

No, it doesn't, that's the whole point I was trying to make. My fitness tracker tracks heart beats for example.

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

#229

Post by Kluny »

damontal wrote: post #224
Kluny wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for reminding me I can't get a full sized ipod classic anymore. It burns. :(

i still have one but have no idea what to use it for. google play on my phone + sonos satisfies all of my music needs.

I had my old one sitting in a dock for years. I'd just hit shuffle when I needed some music. Like turning on the radio, but with only good music. It was stolen.

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

#230

Post by dlevine »

I've been wearing a Garmin or Polar watch for the past several years (run 30+ miles a week), and just recently got an Apple Watch.

For a serious runner, the Garmin watches are a lot better, but the truth is that I'm not really a "serious" runner, and Apple Watch is more pleasurable to use in a lot of ways.

I thought I would mind having to charge it every day coming from a device that needed to be charged about every 6 days (and that's including 24-hour HR tracking and 4-6 runs a week), but the truth is that I don't. I also thought I would mind not having all of the metrics or customizability that the Garmin offers, but the truth is that I'm not a competitive runner, and my V02Max isn't anything more than a curiosity. And, sure it's nice to be able to choose from a million different data fields to display while I'm working out, but the default ones on the Nike Running app are pretty close to what I chose in the first place.

In the end, a lot of the things I thought were non-negotiables ended up not really being a big deal. Apple has really nailed the Watch user experience in lots of little ways.

I intentionally held out when all of my friends bought the original Apple watch (and most subsequently sold it), but I'm noticing that an increasing number of people have adopted the watch a hardware revision and a few OS iterations later.

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