Homeless in Vancouver: Even Samsung is rooting for the Apple Watch

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      Nay-sayers such as myself be damned, Apple appears to know its business. On the first day of sales (April 10), some 957,000 people in the United States placed pre-orders for an average of 1.3 Apple Watches, according to estimates by market analyst Slice Intelligence.

      Meaning that in a mere 24 hours Apple appears to have sold 1,244,100 Apple Watches—more smartwatches than Samsung sold in all of 2014. And mind you, we only have estimates for the U.S. market—on April 10, the Apple Watch became available for pre-sale in eight other countries: Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan and the UK.

      Much has been made of the way the CDN$17,000 gold edition of the Apple Watch sold out in China within an hour.

      A needle in the haystack to a sliver to a big slice of the pie

      Back in February, the research company Smartwatch Group estimated that 89 companies sold a worldwide total of only 6.8 million smartwatches in all of 2014. The top 10 companies accounted for over 70 percent of sales, or 4.8 million units.

      That’s not a market category, that’s a needle in a haystack.

      According to Smartwatch’s numbers, Samsung led with 23 percent of all sales, having shipped 1.2 million smartwatch units, while Pebble was second with 700,000 units shipped.

      The efforts to grow the smartwatch product category over the last three years (and more) by companies large and small: Samsung, Sony, Pebble, Motorola, et cetera, have all failed dismally.

      Basically Apple is being looked to by all its potential competitors to do for smartwatches what the Cupertino company earlier did for smartphones and tablets: grow the sliver into a big pie that everyone can compete for a slice of.

      Eight years after the release of the iPhone, Apple is no longer the dominant smartphone seller; Samsung is. But Apple still does very well, thank you very much, and so do a lot of other smartphone sellers because the market that Apple created in 2007 is so huge, with smartphone sales estimated to have exceeded one billion units in 2014.

      Apple did much the same thing again in 2010 with the release of the iPad.

      And apparently this year it’s done it again with the Apple Watch.

      We won’t really know for a month or more what transpired sales-wise across all nine markets, but based on the estimates of the U.S. market, no one will be surprised if Apple sold more than 6.8 million Apple Watches on April 10. That is to say, Apple may have sold more smartwatches in a day than the entire industry sold in a year.

      And no one is probably rooting harder for that to be so than the executives of Samsung, Sony, Motorola, and Pebble.

      The Apple Watch, what’s it good for?

      I’m on record as almost entirely dismissing smartwatches (I do kind of like the Pebble), and I publicly declared that Apple was too smart to make such a dumb product.

      I was certainly wrong about that last bit but that might be because this isn’t Steve Jobs’ Apple anymore. The Apple Watch marks the beginning of the Tim Cook era and in the Apple Watch, CEO Cook appears to have given Apple’s senior designer, Sir Jonathan Ives, free reign to do his thing.

      I still believe that smartwatches (with the exception of the Pebble)—little more than wee secondary screens for a smartphone—are a pointless and redundant device for the majority of humankind, but I may be wrong about that also.

      I see that Apple is meeting the issue head on by delibarately positioning the Apple Watch as a sort of luxury item—a bit of a first for both Apple and the computer industry. The Cupertino computer maker is leaning especially heavily on its glamour as a style-maker in order to offset the acknowledged technical shortcoming of its first generation effort, such as 18-hour battery life.

      And it seems that people are treating the device that Apple has put before them as a prologue to greater things to come in subsequent iterations of the Apple Watch.

      We’re seeing the kind of faith in the power of Apple’s technical prowess that Windows users used to show in Microsoft’s ability to overcome its challenges to produce a great operating system.

      I remember how, as a Mac user, I could never understand the blind, uncritical faith that Wintel users placed in Microsoft; now that I no longer identify myself as anything but a computer user, I can likewise only shake my head in wonder at the way Apple receives the same blind obedience.

      And in truth, Apple is now what Microsoft once was: the necessary heart and engine of an entire economic ecosystem.

      So many companies profit by its success that the old saw is now true of the Cupertino computer company: when Apple sneezes, the entire computer industry feels a chill.

      If Microsoft coughs though, pundits just rush to write obituaries.

      My top 10 imagined uses for the Apple Watch

      • Doctors will use them instead of stethoscopes
      • Hikers will use the built-in compass to keep from from getting lost (for up to 18 hours)
      • People will swallow them to perform endoscopic self-exams (thank god for those round corners on the way out)
      • Apple will use them to monitor the heartbeat of the world
      • Employers will hack the health monitoring features to use them as on-the-job lie detectors
      • Litigious people will use them to record conversations for use in civil court
      • Other people will begin streaming their audio 24/7
      • There will be a coin-flipping app and a jaw harp app
      • Haptic sex messaging will become a thing
      • And two words: Audio Twitter
      Stanley Q. Woodvine is a homeless resident of Vancouver who has worked in the past as an illustrator, graphic designer, and writer. Follow Stanley on Twitter at @sqwabb.

      Comments

      2 Comments

      Apple fanboy

      Apr 15, 2015 at 3:59pm

      I will buy anything from Apple. I hope they soon make condoms with a touch film.

      Stanley Q Woodvine

      Apr 15, 2015 at 5:03pm

      @fanboy

      If they did, I don't think that the pinch to zoom multi-touch gesture would work the way you hope.