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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.
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.
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.