Smartwatch Shipments Fall For the First Time; Apple Only Company In Top 5 To Decline (venturebeat.com)

Emil Protalinski, reporting for VentureBeat: The smartwatch market has hit its first bump, and it's all Apple's fault. Vendors shipped a total of 3.5 million smartphones worldwide last quarter. This Q2 2016 figure is down 32 percent from the 5.1 million units shipped in Q2 2016, marking the first decline on record. It's important to note that smartwatches are just a subcategory of the larger wearable market. As such, these figures don't count basic bands sold by companies like Fitbit. Apple is thus the undisputed leader, even after the losses it saw in Q2 2016, and it could easily see a return to growth with the release of Watch OS 2.0. Apple's market share decreased 25 percentage points (from 72 percent to 47 percent) and it shipped less than half the smartwatches (1.6 million). But the company still holds almost half the market, with every other vendor shipping fewer than a million units.

Comments

Pebble?

[doconnor]

I'm surprised Pebble is not on the list. Maybe its because they sell most of their watches direct from their website and through KickStarter which isn't covered by this report.

Re:What is the appeal of these things?

[tripleevenfall]

The problem is that they designed the Apple Watch as a crippled device. They didn't want it to cannibalize iPhone sales, so it's basically a remote control for the phone in your pocket.

If they make a watch that can make calls, people will buy them. It could be the iPod Shuffle for the iPhone line. But they don't seem to understand this.

People don't want to carry an additional device to do things their existing device will already do. They want functions combined into a unity device, not more things to be strapped onto their bodies all day.

Re:What is the appeal of these things?

[TheRaven64]

I think that they're a fad in the same way that 1990s smartphones were a fad: the technology to build good ones doesn't exist yet. A watch needs to have a battery that lasts long enough that I never accidentally forget to charge it and end up with it not working (my current one is on its second battery and the first one lasted about 5 years) and be light enough that I don't notice that I'm wearing it. I have both of those from a Skagen watch, but if I could keep those requirements then I'd find it very useful to have things like my day's calendar sync'd to the watch, to be able to use it with Bluetooth for two-factor authentication, to be able to use something like Apple Pay and leave my wallet at home, and so on. Make it a quarter the current thickness and make the battery last a week and I'll happily buy one, but that isn't possible yet.

The same thing was true of Smartphones. It was obvious before the iPhone that there were a lot of useful things that a Smartphone could do, but until LiIon batteries, low-power WiFi chipsets and screens improved to a certain point, the downsides outweight the benefits. The difference between the iPhone and the Apple Watch is that the iPhone was released at precisely the time when the technology made it possible to build the useful thing, whereas the Apple Watch appears to be 5-10 years too early.