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People Still Aren't Buying Smartwatches -- and It's Only Going To Get Worse (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Wearable technology still isn't catching up. Despite a year full of exciting new smartwatches, tech-enabled clothing or jewelry, and fitness activity trackers galore, the growth of the wearables market is still on the decline, according to a new report from research firm eMarketer. In fact, the entire category is being overtaken by smart speakers, at least during the 2017 holiday season. "Other than early adopters, consumers have yet to find a reason to justify the cost of a smartwatch, which can sometimes cost as much as a smartphone," eMarketer forecasting analyst Cindy Liu wrote in the report. "Instead, for this holiday season, we expect smart speakers to be the gift of choice for many tech enthusiasts, because of their lower price points."
Maybe it's because I don't want an accessory on my wrist that offers almost no advantages over the cell in my pocket, meanwhile costing the same as a nice watch but looking like an 80's calculator wrist watch.
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The Pebble hit it right - it did just enough, and the battery lasted a long time on a charge.
None of the crap the fancier watches do is worth having to charge them so frequently.
Fitbit crushed Pebble Smart Watch by buying them out. Since then I've seen them sell their first model in stores and never anything else. I would rather buy a watch I have to charge 2-4 times a month rather than everyday or every other day. I boycott FitBit due to crushing innovation and stepping on a pun-intended "Pebble".
Based on supplier-estimates, so perhaps not the most precise way to measure potential sales:
https://www.phonearena.com/news/Going-strong-the-Apple-Watch-is-en-route-to-set-another-sales-record-in-2018_id100638
that's why.
put the phone in the watch.. with full-day battery life and an OPTIONAL and wireless phone-sized (or larger) tablet for secondary display... THEN you might actually sell some of these stupid things. (you read it here first, boys and girls, don't try to patent this shit)
until then can happen (battery and processor advances needed), enjoy the minuscule market.
The Apple Watch is why the smart watch market is dead. You either get an Apple Watch, or you don't. I love Apple Watch more than I love the iPhone to be honest.
Well, when you double 20 people, it is a big increase... :) Seriously, their market penetration is so minuscule that it does not take much to show a lot of "improvement." But I do not see Tag, Rolex, or any other big watch maker worried.
I've got enough distractions without another one on my wrist. One that I have to charge up every day. One that doesn't do much without the phone that it is paired with. I like watches - real watches with automatic movements. Little mechanical works of art. Not some stupid little redundant blue tooth toy.
...catch on. Mostly, because you have to wear them.
that the battery doesn't last a day. I used to have a Casio watch that I could download data from Outlook to. It was great. It would beep to remind me of my appointments. The battery lasted for years. I don't need a fancy display. What I need is a battery that lasts forever.
To me, wearing a watch at all was always uncomfortable and troublesome, and barely worth the effort just for being able to have a timepiece handy. Upon getting a mobile phone which told the time, I happily gave up wearing a watch. In smartwatches, I see much the same thing as the old-fashioned kind: it's an inconvenient thing strapped to the wrist that doesn't do anything that the phone more conveniently out of the way but still easily accessible in my pocket does.
There are arguments to be made regarding ease/convenience of contactless payment - ie not even needing to get the phone out of one's pocket, but I find that offset by needing to twist the back of the wrist around to meet the EFTPOS terminal. Something that would allow just waving the palm of the hand at the terminal would be better in that regard, but more troublesome in others - needing to wear some kind of glove with a chip located where it would be uncomfortable when doing just about anything else with one's hands. The potential answer to that might be implanting the chip, but that presents its own issues.
And smartwatches are the most promising - or maybe least unpromising - of the bunch. Smart glasses with augmented reality functionality have a decent amount of potential, but there is a lot wrong with them from a general privacy point of view, and even the early adopting nerds and geeks aren't about to be told that we should abandon the idea of privacy, never mind society at large. Fitness tracking devices are a nice idea in theory, but so far have tended not to actually make things better. And no other form of wearable technology really has any advantage over a smartphone in your pocket.
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Why is the word WORSE in the headline? There is nothing worse about consumers refusing to be fooled into buying crap they do not need.
Screw charging once a day, not happening. I have a watch at least 10 years old, battery is still good.
Get the primary function back i.e. just sits there, lets you know what time it is WITHOUT being an attention whore - adding some extra features might be attractive if they don't detract from the watch function.
I think you mean "better".
setting a record when everyone is failing, including them is hardly impressive. That is like saying I sold 7 widgets this year instead of 6, woot sales record.
"and It's Only Going To Get Worse"
no one can see the future stop making shit up
I have owned 2 and here are the problems. Not in color, or it is sort of color just certain parts are. Will not track all the information you want, if you want it all you have to buy 3 different watches and wear them all, dumb just build it all into one. No way to write your own custom exercise item, (i.e. Fitbit you can only pick from 10 options, but I play many other sports and you cannot program them in) Charging make it wireless and able to charge while asleep and track your sleep (Hate taking it off once a week to charge it and lose all my sleep data for that night). Make it interface will all apps out there not just brands or a few others, all of them. Make them durable, wristband breaks, and face cracks, come on these things are 300US, make them last. Adjustable brightness, adjustable fonts, even if you don't think it needs to be that bright or that big, some people need it and they will sacrifice battery to have it. Another charging option make it charge with your motion, I play a lot of sports I would probably never have to charge it just because I move so much. Better Bluetooth interface, more options to store and play back music. Much better interface to your phone. That is just the top few, but you get the idea. I was hopeful after 3 years (then I bought my first one) they would advance greatly in that time, but to this day they just don't work very well. -WS
If Apple ever make's their watches not look like cheap plastic garbage then maybe the big time piece makers will have a bit to worry over.
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1) Have it BE the smartphone. No linking needed, it's just a smart phone designed to be worn, with a small screen and better voice recognition.
2) Have it do essential body measurements. Make one that accurately measures blood sugar and all the diabetics will come to you. Same for any other medical information that people check at least 1/day. If it can detect calorie consumption, that would be a huge dieting aid - my watch says to stop eating now.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
For many years Rolex has been #1 in watch sales revenue, by a wide margin. Not anymore. The Apple watch blew past it this year. Pretty good for a failure.
Yeah. Try getting out of your parents' basement sometime. Out here in the real world, I'd estimate that at least 50% of my coworkers have Apple Watches. Probably 75% of my friends have them. (Just to be charitable, I'm leaving out the ones who actually work for Apple.) And if you go out and about in the city (shopping, dining, socializing, etc.) it's not at all uncommon for cashiers, baristas, waiters, and bartenders to have them.
Imagine all the people...
> People Still Aren't Buying Smartwatches -- and It's Only Going To Get Worse
"Worse" only if you're trying to sell them. They're a solution in search of a problem that doesn't exist, the sooner they disappear the better.
I have the stainless series 0 - got the stainless wrist band recently - no plastic visible other than the screen. (Which may be glass, don't know for sure.) So I am three years into it now.
I did not wear a watch before this, and I really appreciate it. I move around work a lot, and do not carry my phone with me, so being able to answer calls on the watch is great. Immediate access to texts is a plus - ladies like it when you respond to them. Heart rate and activity monitoring have encouraged me to walk more, et cetera. So for me, a smart watch is a bit of a game changer. Sorry for the people who don't experience the benefits.
Working on Ka-band amplifiers... what a waste of my time. I should be working on networked AI smart underwear, with 3D printed reinforced gussets and IoT connectivity to the cloud, and automatic Facebook updates and VR glasses.
FUND ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Mostly random stuff.
Yeah. Try getting out of your parents' basement sometime. Out here in the real world, I'd estimate that at least 50% of my coworkers have Apple Watches. Probably 75% of my friends have them. (Just to be charitable, I'm leaving out the ones who actually work for Apple.) And if you go out and about in the city (shopping, dining, socializing, etc.) it's not at all uncommon for cashiers, baristas, waiters, and bartenders to have them.
Yes, waiters and baristas are the fashion trend-setters. Those guys with the Rolex and a BMW are just wannabes.
I need a smartwatch with a lead case that will last 20 years on a single charge of Pu-238 ... a radio-isotope generator would not require me to charge it once or twice a day.
I kickstarted the Pebble (grey). It wasn't bad at all, though getting it took a while. AndroidWear looked awesome to me. I ordered a Moto 360 the day they became available to order, and then I wore it until its battery gave out nearly two years later. At that point, I was all set to order a 3rd generation Moto 360, but Motorola cancelled it. I was eager for what became the LG Watch Sport when it was a rumored Google release, but the thing was huge. Every so often I look at what is available, but nothing calls to me like the Moto 360 did.
Meanwhile, my first smartwatch, an old Ironman Datalink, keeps chugging along.
The trouble with smartwatches is the screen size makes them dumb. The screen size is too small for any serious reading or typing. The only way I could effectively use a watch is if you had a holographic projection that made the screen larger and could project a larger keyboard that could detect my finger movements. I have enough trouble typing on a smartphone and use a computer for any major typing.
There is a reason smartphone screens have been trending larger. They are easier to use
Cabbage patch kids? Hulu hoops? Lava lamps? Tamagotchis? Smart watches? Anyone?
In other words, fads come and go.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
It's only growing, not growing fast enough... welcome to the new fail. Also iWatch sales are actually up 50% YoY. The convenience of not fishing the phone out of your pocket was always going to be slim. Not everyone wants any watch on their wrist, much less tech bling. Oh and the iWatch 3 comes in a cellular version you can use without the phone, at the cost of battery life. The whole article reads like "they'll never be able to put a useful computer in a watch form factor". Well that's what they said about PCs. And laptops. And phones. I'm not sure saying it about watches is a good bet...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Pebble hit it totally right but they got killed.
My Timex Weekender is still my favorite watch, and I already know Iâ(TM)ll still be wearing it after my Apple watch dies in a few years. For $30 if it gets destroyed itâ(TM)s no big deal. My money is still on analog.
OK, so my almost all of my co-workers bought smartwatches, apple, Samsung, fitbit, etc.
I prefer my solar, atomic, G-shock analog. Classy for dress, practical for work or weekend riding. Never have to fuss with batteries or setting the time.
It. Just. Works. Forever*.
*Forever as is in longer than any smartwatch or most "normal" watches would dream of existing.
No matter what the technology can do, I can't wear a watch. Why? It triggers carpal tunnel syndrome. The pressure of even a leather watch strap is enough to cause issues. I suspect many other people have had this issue as well, but there is very little documentation of such issues in the health community.
I'm not interested in a computer that runs on nonfree software, is network-capable, and running code I'm not allowed to fully understand, fix, alter, run only when I want, or share with others (in short, software freedom). I see no reason to trust the manufacturers, the proprietary software developers, or the distributors with my privacy and I see nothing in the ads for any of the devices to convince me otherwise (something I believe to be their job if they want me to buy their product).
I might find it convenient to have access to the information such a device can grant, but not at the cost of my privacy or my software freedom. I also don't have a problem with paying for respect for my privacy and my software freedom. But so long as that's not an option, there's simply nothing for me to consider. The high price and other technical shortcomings (small screen, hard-to-use touchscreen controls, etc.) are relatively minor details; issues that I can address myself with software freedom.
Digital Citizen
I still use a Data Link USB, which I've used since 2003. It's great at what it does, faster and more convenient than a smartphone, and the battery lasts for over a year. It good because doesn't try to be a shitty wrist-sized smartphone, it does what it sets out to do well.
Seriously: what is the use case for having a "smart" watch?
Fitness is about the only one that I've seen that comes close to being a killer app (disclosure: I have, and regularly use, a Garmin 935.) Apart from that, I really don't see anything on the market that provides a good reason for owning one.
If you need (or want) a fitness watch, then great - there's plenty of options out there. But everything else just seems like a product in search of a market. No surprise that the market isn't exactly bursting with sales, when they haven't been able to define a significant reason to own one beyond that (relatively narrow) market.
Meanwhile, literally nobody I know has one, because they aren't hipsters with shit jobs and moronic friends (You).
The problem, for me at least, is the battery life. The thing has to get a charge on a daily basis. The Apple watch and other watches offer nice features, but having to charge it every day (a recent iPhone needs only a charge every 3-4 days) is a concern.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Two fundamental problems with smart watches:
My smart phone that is always in my pocket does far more and is less likely to get damaged.
My dumb digital watch with an electrolumenescent back-light still does what I expect a watch to do, it does it for $35 dollars, it's permanently water proof for showers and pool swimming, it lasts 6 years on a single battery and I can't figure out why I would want to replace it.
The screen of a smart watch is too small to do jack on and other than maybe buying a fitness tracker, I can't fathom screwing around with watch apps when my nice big phone is right in my pocket. The smart watch is a hangover from the Dick Tracey days of the radio watch fantasy, the problem is we already have better tech than was imagined in the Star Trek communicators, so we kind of leap frogged the whole Dick Tracey watch thing both functionally and practically. Now smart watches are relegated to to the nerd toy aisle unless and until they can be more practical than a real watch with some actually valuable, unique functions.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Are we sure that "tech enthusiasts" is the right word for someone bringing a spy device into their home? In my mind, the only people with "smart" speakers in their homes that can reasonably be called enthusiasts are the guys who build their own and leave out the "report all of my conversations to Google or Amazon" feature. Or, you know, the guys who have been running Mister House (which does all the same stuff) since the 1990s.
See that "Preview" button?
I've been wearing a samsung galaxy gear since late 2015. rooted and running _null rom (lack of options in custom roms for it. this is basically a heavily tweaked stock rom). now its basically a small android 4.2 device constantly bluetooth tethered to my phone. works great for checking messages and emails when pulling my phone out of my pocket would take too much time. also makes a good camera for those moments than need to be captured but will be gone before i get my phones camera app open. (stock camera app is awful though. only allows like 30s of video, and a limited number of photos)
i've tried other devices and couldn't stand them. i wore a moto 360 for about a day, before i decided it would never do what i wanted it for. it had lots of pretty watch faces and looked good, so it would make a good watch. anything else it was too limited to be useful. i wore a samsung gear s running cm 13 for a couple months. it worked pretty well being a phone. after a while though i got annoyed by its battery life and how it didnt do anything more than the gear + phone setup i had before. its chargers were also prone to suddenly loosing one of the clips and requiring lots of fiddling to work.
most other devices ive seen i cant build an interest in because they run either andoid wear, watchOS, or some other closed or heavily limited os. android on your wrist is pretty useful (even if its old and samsungy jellybean like the gear). watered down android with half the useful stuff taken out and only hacky ways to install normal apps isnt.
I love the smartwatches I've had and think they are about the greatest things on earth. I love having quick notifications that I can feel on my wrist vibrating. I like being able to quickly get all the stats I want to see like weather, time, and steps without having to pull my phone out. I even like the speakerphone on my Android Wear watch. There seems to be significant public resistance to even the concept of wearing a wristwatch, much less one that can offer some utility. It goes beyond the, "Meh, I'm not interested," and is more like, "Not only am I not interested, but I can't understand why anyone would be interested. It's a social menace! It should be outlawed! Smartwach users should be thrown in jail!" I simply cannot understand the extreme hostility. For me, the smartwatch has been a godsend. Can I live without one? Yes, but it's worth the extra value that I get having one.
Cost is an issue. Most smartwatches today are extremely expensive, which is probably the main reason why people aren't getting them. Drop them to under $100 and there would be much more interest. Once people have used a smartwatch, they realize all the things they can do with them and how useful they really are. I've never known anyone to abandon their smartwatch once they've tried it. Even the skeptics seem to be impressed. Battery life is also an issue, of course. Too much focus on making a pretty OLED screen instead of a less power hungry transflective LCD one.
Pebble got both the price point and battery life right on their watches. Unfortunately, mismanagement did them in. Meanwhile, I see so many people with Apple Watches, which means that it can't be all bad. There are a lot of smartwatch enthusiasts out there, but they are a relatively small niche at the moment. It's just hard to get over the, "What do I need a watch for?" resistance that is incredibly intense for some reason. Apple has been quite successful in busting through. It's really time for Google to step up their game. At least Samsung is trying. At some point, someone will figure out a way to break through the doubters and make people want to try something that really can be something worthwhile if they try it.
...maybe wherever you are, but here in Kansas City? Where hundreds of thousands of people live?
I don't even see REGULAR wristwatches, let alone iWatches or any other digital watch.
It's got a few more use cases than an HTC Vive, but it's about as much of a luxury.
It's amusing watching people contort their wrists attempting to touch their Apple Watch to a PIN-pad to use Apple Pay. It looks painful enough I can't see how that'd be 'more convenient'.
The screen is so tiny that trying to use its touch interface is a drag. It's useful if you get regular notifications you don't often need to respond to (say, if you're a day-trader), otherwise you might as well just pull out the phone (perhaps setting personalized ringtones).
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I wear a watch when I go and work. It's a lower tech standard-digital watch. I need a new one every few years. It gets scratched, torn, nicked, and generally roughly treated in ways that would utterly destroy the minicomputer that is a smart watch. All the functions other than telling the time are unnecessary when at work. That's why I haven't bought a smart watch or any other wearable computer. It isn't needed, even though I think the devices are needed by someone somewhere, just not me. Anything I might need a SW to do is total science fiction. Like brief antigravity or blood editing.
There are people that need $20,000 on their wrist, and there are people that focus on effective solutions. I knew one billionaire that wore a g-shock for that reason; I imagine he is working hard to resist the Apple Watch today, if he has not already succumbed.
It says that only growth has slowed, but 20% of people use some sort of smartwatch. While that's a lot less than the 77% of people who use smartphones, 20% is still a pretty large chunk of people. There are a ton of products that never even come close to reaching that kind of market saturation, and yet no one labels them "failures". The bar is set ridiculously high for what it considered to be a success for smartwatches versus almost everything else in them marketplace.
Rolex specialise in selling very very low volumes of high priced individual items. When you have to compare a product revenue to a company that specialises like that you are in deep shit!
I am guessing you actually work somewhere with apple or around a large apple area. I work in IT and I know of precisely 1 person in or out of IT with an apple watch and that includes many who I know are apple fans, the one that has one only has it as it was gifted to him by apple as they were trying to convince the CTO to purchase more apple products.
Apple sell around 10-20 million apple watches a year world wide. Lets be generous and say sales in the US are half those and it is at the high end. Even then unless you fucking work next door to apple the likelihood of 50% of your coworkers and 75% of friends having them is statistically improbable, unless of course you only have 2 coworkers and 4 friends.
Give these things time. Once they have the whole "continuous medical data recording" thing sorted out (heart rate, blood sugar, if we are talking luxury, even blood pressure, perhaps?), people will wear them constantly. They are not that good at these things yet, though, so adoption is naturally a bit slower than you might expect.
Your smartphone is for connectivity, but your smartwatch is for your health. And it can of course give you weather reports, too, and tell you if someone texted you - but these are side effects. Keeping tabs on your metabolic parameters is the #1 reason to wear something close to your body like that.
You need to feed it and it constantly distracts you. Grow up.
Or maybe he doesn't live in the suburbs with a bunch of old baby boomers. The watches aren't evenly distributed across the population.
Sorry, but there just isn't a good reason to buy a smartwatch.
First of all, I haven't worn a watch in 20 years, and I don't actually want to. There would have to be a good reason.
Secondly, I already have a smartphone (so does nearly everyone else) and unless a watch can do everything my phone already does, then I don't need it. I certainly don't need both, and I don't want to have to charge and keep track of both.
They were #1. That means all the other watch makers had less revenue. Please explain how that puts one in "deep shit"?
Not when high-margin products are where the money is at. Same reason Apple makes most of the money on smartphones despite having a fraction of Android's marketshare. And if your business had the choice between making the most money and selling the largest number of units...which would you choose?
I think manufacturers should differentiate between two categories, the true smartwatch that might eventually morph into a Dick Tracy smartphone and the more focused physical activity tracker. I have the latter, which I pair with my cellphone. It has an almost Unix-like austerity to it, practically just a portable pedometer and fairly accurate heart rate monitor. I don't need all the bells and whistle of a tricorder wannabe on my wrist. Fitness trackers could very well be the dumb phones of the smartwatch market.
Actually, Rolex sells 800.000 to 1.000.000 watches per year. Not very very low volumes, in fact one of the biggest selling brands despite the price. Not sure how much the average price of the Rolexes in the market is. 7000 usd perhaps, because I expect that the less expensive ones sell more. And the average apple watch price - perhaps 400 usd because I mainly see the sport models. Since Apple Watch has surpassed rolex in value, that would mean that they sell more than around 18 million pieces per year. Not bad at all.
You can just doubleclick the button below the crown on the apple watch to trigger Apple Pay. Authentication happened earlier when you put it on and is canceled when you take it off. I use it quite often.
We had our Christmas lunch yesterday with about 20 family members. Four people had Apple watches and I have a Fitbit Ionic (which is mostly a fitness tracker with some smart watch features).
I think it will be a slow burn, but totally anecdotally I feel like I'm seeing more and more smart watches. At least 3 colleagues have them as well (all Android ones).
I'm surprised by how much value I get out of even the half assed smart watch features of my thing. Apple watch seems way better.
The Smartwatch market essentially is as dead as the smartphone market. Everyone is building more or less exactly the same device. The mass market hates innovation because it means risks.
Meanwhile there's some actual innovation in the field of home made smart watches. For example Travid Goodspeed's "GoodWatch"
https://github.com/travisgoods...
It runs for years with a single battery and has way better functionality than any commercial smartwatch. You even have a keyboard.
So I am quite interested in mainly mechanical watches. As an engineer, isn’t it wonderful how a watch without electronics can be accurate to a few seconds per day? I still find it marvelous. I have a small collection with both vintage ones and modern ones - a recent arrival is the Hemel HFT20 with a mechanical chrono, a kind of homage to the pilot chronos of the 1970s and 70s.
Regarding quartz, I also occasionally enjoy a GShock Mudmaster because it is such a beast.
Anyway, the above as a preamble. Two years ago my wife gave me the Apple Watch series 0 and it surprises me how much I like it. It is the stainless one, looks better on a suit.
First impression from a watch nerd pov, the straps are excellent, the simple mechanism tonchange them and the general feel of them is superb. If someone can point me to a traditional nato strap of the same material as the Apple nylon straps, please say so.
Second, it is simply a very accurate watch to start with, even if it doesn t connect to your phone it will actually stay more accurate than a standard quartz watch thanks to a thermocompensated module. Have a look in a shop window, in the afternoon you will see 2 seconds difference between the slowest and quickest g shock with radio syncing (this happena at night normally) while a table with apple watches runs perfectly in sync. That is cool engineering.
Now the apps. The device is good for drawing your attention, not for interacting deeply. I like: general discreet notifications with a tap signal, set up for my close friends and family only. The calendar, the weather, the activity monitor, the iphone camera remote. I don’t use many 3rd party apps though the ebay reminder can be useful.
Has it displaced my beloved mechanicals? No, but I enjoy it and wear statistically most often (the first world problem of any watch nerd is to decide which watch to wear that day), in fact some weeks I only wear it.
That would be my guess too. I know exactly two people having an Apple Watch. My sister, who would never have bought it, but got it as a present two years ago (or was it a year?). The second one is an Apple fan at work.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
cost and battery life are enough for me to not really be interested. people are sick of having to charge their stuff once or even twice a day. already you might have a laptop, phone and wireless headphones. I'm running out of space for all those charges. also, if you have that many devices, what's the point of the watch? until they make a watch that can genuinely replace an existing niche device across a basic set of functions, it's just not going to take off.
Sounds like he must live in some weird arse hippy commune as the volume sold means any significant concentration ANYWHERE is improbable without some strange apple bias to the area. personally I live and work in a city whose primary livelihood is IT and most here would be in their late 20's to 30's. the reality is apart from hippies and retards who would buy a turd if Apple stuck their logo on it smartwatches just aren't selling.
when you look back at the sales projections they were expecting a more than 100% increase in sales, so that is actually pretty bad numbers, especially when you are growing off a small base. With growth on the decline when such a low market penetration I doubt they will find those numbers comforting.
WTF, 1,000,000 is a piddly low number for a world wide company with high end market domination. Also where did you get your numbers? last I saw Rolex manufactured only around 500k a year so unless they have had recent manufacturing explosion you have some weird numbers. To put that in perspective that is 2,000 watches on average per country in the world. Obviously more heavily concentrated in the richer countries but regardless it is a very low number.
is if they replenish powers while you carry them around in your rectum.
True but part of the issue is that repeat customers for a Rolex or similar watch are low. My Seiko Kinetic is 17 years old and I have no plans on replacing anytime soon. Admittedly it needed a new capacitor this year and it's had several straps over the years (I can't stand metal straps so it's leather and they wear out), and unless it gets destroyed in an accident I don't expect to replace it in the next decade either. I would imagine the same is true of similar higher end watches. Personally I would never own a Rolex or other mechanical watch because I like the precision of quartz, so it's a Kinetic or an Eco-Drive watch for me.
Anyway with low repeat business the sale numbers make more sense. On the other hand a smart watch is likely to be useless lump in five years or less so much more repeat business, and starting with next to no market saturation to being with you are likely to have higher sales numbers.
So in there is probably orders of magnitude more ordinary watches in daily use than smart watches and it's likely to stay that way for many years to come.
I've got a smart watch and I don't wear it. Why? Battery life.
With a Casio watch on my wrist, I measure the time between "charging" the battery in years rather than hours.
I used to wear a watch. I work from home now, so it's not useful to have a clock on my arm. I used to have a calculator watch but it was so slow to enter things. Approximations are faster than standing around trying to type on a teeny tiny keyboard.
Their market penetration is not miniscule. They are already outselling all the other watchmakers, Rolex included.
But it seems clear that Apple has sold at least in the 10s of millions of watches, which you know, if it wasn't Apple, people would be calling that a runaway success.
And I certainly see them a lot on people's wrists, crossing all kinds of socio-economic and racial boundaries.
So it seems to me that people love to say it's a failure but reality seems to disagree.
It scrapes the crap out of my wrists. I ditched watches a long time ago.
"Upon getting a mobile phone which told the time, I happily gave up wearing a watch." And since, I have been like that. Watches are cumbersome. There are people that wear them for the fashionable content, which does not attract me so there is no reason for wearing a watch, imagine paying big bucks for a thing that goes on your wrist and just doubles what you already have in your phone. Silly. As for wearables, I don't see yet any real advantages or practical things build or created. I say that without even touching the price subject. Would never pay big bucks for something tech. I never buy cell phones over R$ 1000,00 too (some U$ 300,00). So, we already got enough tech to fuc.k our brains up. No more needed.
The pebble time round was almost perfect - one more iteration would have been an absolute killer.
For me, I want good battery and very light and thin; I am interested in notifications and the ability to program it. I don't care about colour, or any of the "fitness"/"quantified self" stuff. Being able to use it for payments would be nice too.
My wife and I swapped our FitBit HR devices for Samsung Gear S3. Because the Gear S3 has it's own cell capability, and can store music, I can go to the gym (while I'm on call) and listen to music while I work out without having to constantly adjust or worry about my cell phone. At the same time, the S3 is playing music, and waiting for calls, it's counting steps, monitoring heart rate, etc. Then it syncs back with my phone for tracking when I get home.
Samsung Pay has proven to be a lot of fun (if not useful when you forget your wallet). My wife has it working on her phone, but can't get it working on her watch. I on the other hand have had no trouble with the watch, and I'm able to use it to pay for things without digging out my wallet. It doesn't work on gas pumps (they use a physical switch to know when the card is inserted), but most other places it works well.
No matter what they tell you about battery life, it's a LIE!
Not everyone needs or desires like me with one of those voice interactive speaker do dads. + HRM stand alone & BT chest strap for jogging + BT remote screen for including myself in pics + hands full can see text or voice calls vs digging large smart phone out of pocket or bag. Quick text response. + while jogging can see extreme weather alerts including tsunamis. I jog on grass sport fields in flood plain. Lightning more common. Fiddle with flash cards for drilling new terms. Once in a while helps find my phone at home hidden under something. - battery requires discipline to power down when not using and to charge in advance. - heavier than regular watch which I rarely wore coz it too was more bulk on wrist that usually did not need. Garmin nicer than Apple for exercise but not significantly and Apple has other nice features since only jog a few hours a week. Think about your life and if convenience worth the investment. Have an original Apple Watch works fine for 2 going on 3 rd year. Estimate About $100 / year. I can rationalize $10/month of convenience received. Still using iPhone 6S+. - another modest asset might lose or break.
The article and the comments here completely ignore the existence of the Apple Watch, which by all indications is selling extremely well. Why is that? And don't give me the standard "Apple fanbois are stupid" line that I see so often from Android fans. Having owned two Apple watches (original and Series 3), as well as a Huawei watch and LG Style, I have my own suspicions as to why non-Apple watches are failing... but what do you think?
Digital watch wearing fucktards like you are not the intended audience, especially since you're smartphone is Samsung Galaxy S3. Dumbass.
too small to do jack on
but not too small to do jack off
but then again, i've never used a smartwatch before. i would hope these things are video-capable, for the sake of both making a funny and actual accessory utility(read: distraction).
I dont want a stupid Rubik's cube sized smartwatch attatched to my wrist. And I dont want a small smartwatch either, because of the small screen.
What I want is a whole computer with a full keyboard an large screen popupscreen covering my entire forearm, from the elbow to the wrist. That will look impressive, and wiil be more useful as well.
No go invent it, so you can shut up and take my money.
I generally think many people since the advent of smartphones simply don't wear a watch anymore and the one's that still do want only a nice watch not a smartphone extension. In the end who wants to look at a tiny screen that functions as your smartphone screen? There is a small niche market for wearable's for athletic uses. But that hardly is a huge market to support many brands.
It's not a wearable ipad. It's a somewhat inconspicuous camera.
Can't be. I saw tons of ugly Christmas sweaters with LED-lit Christmas trees on them yesterday.
I like my Mi Band 2 because it allows me to set my phone aside and get only important notifications from my family (through the Mi Band Tools app where I can filter them).
Restricting my impulse to look at crap on my phone or browse the internet at all is important to me, I have to undo all of that bad training and this helps. It cost less than $40, battery lasts a month, and it helps me count steps and monitor heart rate when I exercise.
I hated watches before because I didn't want to always know what time it was (anxiety), and hated having anything on my wrist besides. But the advantages here have me wearing something again, and the on-demand screen is unobtrusive and I only see information when I want to.
Twinstiq, game news
"Despite a year full of exciting new smartwatches..."
First sentence. That's where you lost me.
And they are handy.
A couple of years ago I picked up a 'refurbished' Samsung Gear Live for $79 on ebay. Bestbuy had taken them in as returns and their elite geek squad refurbishers flashed it with the wrong rom. It worked but wouldn't update android wear. So those were sold and most came back again and they dumped them on ebay wholesalers. All it needed was to be hooked up to the pc with adb and flashed with the right rom.
Having gotten a perfectly well working watch for 1/5 the original list price, I put it to work.
It replaced my fitbit with android fit, told me the time, weather, charge state of itself and my phone, all my notifications came up on it, if I was in the car and the phone rang I could answer it, and with 'ok google' I could trigger my phone to do a lot without picking it up. Lastly, wink ran on it so I could open/close/lock my front door and garage door.
Fast forward to this year. Verizon abandoned their $400 wear24 smart watch after just a few months and they've been on ebay for $75-80 for months. Running android wear 2.0, with internal LTE and GPS, more ram than most smart watches and included wireless charging dock it was a steal. Took me 20 minutes to get it doing everything my old smart watch did. I can also run google maps with navigation on it and it vibrates and announces the turn by turn with a mini map on my wrist.
I can also activate it on verizon for 5-10 bucks and use it as a standalone phone, although the little speaker on it sucks for phone calls. It has NFC but verizon only allows it to work with verizon pay. Morons.
It won't get any more updates but my gear live was stuck on android wear 1.3 and still does everything fine. In 2 years I'll replace the Wear24 with someone elses deeply discounted mistake where the issue doesn't really impact me.
Only in this backwards, investor-focused fantasy is not buying a product that never existed before and that nobody wants an issue. I'm sure it won't be in the long term, where new consumers can be programmed to think that redundant, risky device is desirable. Digital economy is so used to growth that they've pretty much given up on R&D, view it as a sunk cost or reassign implementation as R&D in their books to make their company look innovative, and think that just releasing a minimum viable product is all that is required.
You can see it very clearly in the iPhone X. $1000 phone who's major defining feature is it's price. It's no longer necessary to come up with something new and useful, just slap on some miniaturized tech, poop out a tech demo and then integrate it into the base proprietary product so that it magically becomes necessary.
Two things are going to happen in the near to mid future, some consumers are going to be dependent on this artificial mill wheel of "technology innovation" and others are going to abandon it for actual utility by using much more capable free and open hardware and software, out of necessity to compete with the pyramid-scheme style technology silos.
Rolex doesn't publish production but usefully, they get their movements COSC certified, and in 2011 there were 751,285 COSC movements. Currently it is expected that they sell between 800k and 1M.
Considering the price of even an "entry level" Oyster Perpetual, I find it amazing that they can sell so many. But then they enjoy a very strong brand perception. Buying a Rolex is for many still a sign of "I made it".
I've worn a watch, since a teenager in the 70's. Feel's funny to NOT wear one. But, smartwatches, are TOO expensive, and their battery life it too short. I carry my phone with me, strapped to a belt clip. If I need anything more than the time, day/date or stopwatch, I just grab my smartphone. When a call comes in, if I am out and about, I either have it on my car, which displays who's calling, or the BT headset, which speaks to me saying who's calling. I have an inexpensive Casio Illuminator (big dial & numbers), battery lasts for YEARS, not HOURS. Less than $50.00, rugged, dependable.
I will not be buying one.
An always on tracker listener?
I stopped wearing wristband watches about 15 years ago, because I could always tell the time from my mobile phone or from any of the hundreds and thousands of timepieces everywhere.
Same here. My Timex from 1995 still works with 3 battery replacements. These devices certainly cannot complete with cheap digital or analog watches. They are not luxury time pieces meant to replace a Rolex or Omega. My father still wears a Speedmaster he bought in the 1960s. I doubt anybody in 2060 will be wearing a 2017 Apple Watch. A smart phone can already measure steps and distance for fitness tracking. I don't know what role smart watches fill other than toys for gadget geeks.
All I need is the correct time, not my email, Facebook status nor Twitter updates. Period!
I've purchased three Pebble watches over the years with a 66% defect rate. One was for me, two were for my wife. Mine never worked reliably. My wife's second watch was DOA, and Pebble gouged me on the return (the extra bands I bought along with the defective watch were not considered to be defective, so huge restocking fees). After so much frustration and money lost on these expensive non-essentials, we've decided to give up on smart watches entirely.
Received a nice smart watch for Christmas, Cant say I had to have it, It was a nice gift and I had been looking at getting one myself if Santa had not brought me one. I knew going in that they are not "magical watches to solve all my issue. There is still no KILLER app that makes a smart watch a must have item. It can tell time, so that's nice, My last stupid watch died and had gone for a while without a watch so having time on my arm will be nice again. The big advantage I see is being able to quickly see txt message and answer or most likely reject a phone call from my arm. NO reaching into my pocket to see who calling/txting me. less meeting interruptions. We shall see what else I can make it do.
Of course they were obsolete before they were invented. Cell phones basically come from the history of the 1960s Star Trek ideal of the communicator. Apple took it farther, with the iPhone, but then they failed to learn the lesson Star Trek already had: the "wrist communicator" lasted for only one movie before they replaced it.
Got that right! They're only good for simple notification and action buttons. Managing an entire OS from a tiny screen is meant for people with tiny fingers.
it is the opposite actually. Rolex have a LOT of repeat customers. Rolex are fashion accessories for the rich, they don't have 1 or 2, many have draws full of them for different occasions.
Rolex even though the numbers are extremely small in sales owe a large chunk of those numbers to repeat customers. They aren't watches that are just purchased as a single items, many will have draws full of them as status symbol fashion accessories. When you take that into account the incredibly small number they sell shrinks even more. 800K-1M isn't anything amazing in numbers once you spread them out around the world as unlike apple Rolex are in every country, basically anywhere their are rich people chances are their is a Rolex distributor and as was mentioned that amounts to just a 2-5 thousand watches per country per year. Take all the special and custom editions created as prizes out and it is even less
I realize most people on Slashdot are old fogies who don't like new things, so it's expected that many here just won't understand the advantages of having a smart watch. For me, I loved having it...BUT, I sold out of the whole tech. Android Wear is extremely useful, especially for someone who works out, but it was clear by the battery life (most of which having only 1.5 days...2 days at the very best for a new device) that manufacturers wanted your watch to be unusable within a couple years. Fuck that. I'm not about to invest in "optional" tech that the company wants to milk you for. It's a convenience, but not one I'm willing to get slapped around for. When they start making them with more current processors and battery life that goes for a week, I might consider having one again, but until then they can stuff it. A shame when innovation is stifled by corporate greed.
Their market penetration is not miniscule. They are already outselling all the other watchmakers, Rolex included.
No one owns the watch market. Compare it to their phone penetration...
And you use a smartphone? Unless you are running Linux on a PC then much of what you are talking about does not exist.
You've changed the argument. We weren't arguing about whether or not Apple owned the market. Nor were we arguing about their market penetration compared with iPhone. We were arguing about whether their market penetration was "miniscule" - your words. The watchmaker that sells the most watches in the world doesn't have a "miniscule" market penetration. That's delusional.
I find this sort of talk about Apple ludicrous. It's always about Apple, nobody else seems to be judged this way. They sell more watches than any other watchmaker in the world, and people like you still describe it as "pretty bad". Apple are the most successful "failure" in the world. I wish I failed as hard as them, it would be fun to own a superyacht and private jet.
Nope. I don't work with or for Apple. And I'm a good hour or so (In good traffic, longer when 280 turns to crap.) away from Cupertino. I just have normal friends and a normal job in sys/dev/cloud/whateverOps, and live a pretty normal life.
Imagine all the people...
People aren't buying smartwatches - the data will prove or disprove this, sure.
It's only going to get worse - how can you know? I'll bet in the 1970s very very few people were buying MacBooks and Chromebooks too (I dare go so far as to say a total of zero).
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think smart watches are a pretty neat idea.”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/54481-far-out-in-the-uncharted-backwaters-of-the-unfashionable-end
Until they actually make wearable tech that is actually waterproof; it isn't usable really. When you can wear one exercising and void the warrantee because water got in... worthless.
Anyway, for me they are totally missing the mark. I don't give a flying flip how many steps I've walked. I'm an old fart that wants my smart watch to automatically check BP and heart rate and buzz like hell if it gets outside the parameters I set. Vibrating on the wrist when a phone call comes in is good. Displaying caller ID is good. But I have too bloody much stuff trying to talk to me already. .. curmudgeonly snort!
NRRPT/RCT
I said they had small penetration. AC said, they have more then anybody else. I responded that was because NO ONE had large penetration, unlike, for example, in phones. See the logic now?
You are not the market, then.