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No One Is Buying Smartwatches Anymore (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Gizmodo report: Remember how smartwatches were supposed to be the next big thing? About that... The market intelligence firm IDC reported on Monday that smartwatch shipments are down 51.6 percent year-over-year for the third quarter of 2016. This is bad news for all smartwatch vendors (except maybe Garmin), but it's especially bad for Apple, which saw shipments drop 71.6 percent, according to the IDC report Apple is still the overall smartwatch market leader, with an estimated 41.3-percent of the market, but IDC estimates it shipped only 1.1 million Apple Watches in Q3 2016, compared with 3.9 million in 2015. To a degree, that's to be expected, since the new Apple Watch Series 2 came out at the tail-end of the quarter. But the news is still a blow, when you consider how huge the Apple Watch hype was just 18 months ago.
Folks, all of this is from numbers pulled out of some IDC analyst's rear end. Their estimates are no better than SWAG's. I should know, I've had to use their reports in a past life. Sometimes they're accurate, as companies will report otherwise confidential numbers so long as they can't be backed out of the reports. However, Apple doesn't play those games and in this case it's explicitly some analyst's best guess. Most analysts badly misunderstand Apple, and when you misunderstand the biggest player in the market your analysis is almost certain to be wrong.
Also, Garmin's growth was from a very low base. It's easy to grow by 300+% if you start from almost zero.
> Nobody is UPGRADING their smartwatches
You're acting as though this is an item that everyone has. It isn't. It's an item where most people took one look at it and said, "meh". Meanwhile in that same time period, I bought a conventional automatic watch because you never have to wind it and you never have to change the battery. It always works, it's (old) alternative energy and for me that makes it cool. One of the thing we often forget in technology is that sometimes our ancestors already solved the energy problems we're facing today, simply because they didn't have any.
The original target market for wrist watches were pilots and racing drivers who couldn't afford to get the hands off the steering to pull out a watch and look at the time. That's why expensive watches still have names like "sky master" or "pilote". I stopped wearing a watch about 15 years ago when I was on-call and had to carry a cell phone with me all the time.
Watch collector/restorer here.
I don't like the huge, fat watch thing either. Nor am I a fan of subdials and other complications for daily wear. And here's the thing: for the most part ostentatiously big, fat, complicated watches are a low-end phenomenon. As you go higher hundreds and then into thousands of dollars, visual complexity shrinks until you are looking at something like a Rolex Milgauss for about $5000. The Migauss is somewhat fatter than I'd prefer because it's very robust -- it's designed for every day use. For dress use, if cost were no object, I'd wear something like a Vacheron Constantin Patrimony, which is 2.6 mm thick and 20.6 mm across. It's small, but the clean design means it doesn't have to be big. For that reason I wouldn't spend the additional $10,000 for the date complication.
Smartphones haven't eliminated the usefulness of wristwatches; they've just eliminated the usefulness of all the gee-gaws on watches for purposes other than telling time. You don't need the day/date complication, and you don't need the stopwatch or countdown timer, that stuff just makes a watch complicated to operate and hard to read. All you need is the hour, minute and second hand. I also make extensive use of a rotating dive-watch bezel for timing things like runs. When I rebuild watches I sometimes replace the face to cover up the day/date complication because it just clutters the design.
That's the problem with watches: it's hard to find a thoughtfully-designed, stripped down watch for under $500. But you can find them. One of my favorite cheap watches is a Casio that costs only $15 on Amazon -- I think of it as a disposable watch. It is very, very cheap in every respect, but it tells time as well as a $5000 Rolex and has similarly clean design. The only changes I'd make would be to improve the lume and remove the day/date complication.
Anyhow, if you showed up wearing a Patrimony I'd be impressed -- not because you spent $12,000 on a watch, but that you'd spent $12,000 on a watch whose value only a serious connoisseur would recognize. If you want to impress the ignorant, go big. If you want to impress the sophisticated, go simple.
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