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The research that shows Apple is right to take its time over the iWatch

wearables

New research from Endeavour shows that more than half of U.S. consumers who have owned a wearable device no longer use it, and of those two-thirds stopped using it within the first six months of ownership. This is up from the 40 percent abandonment found by a similar survey by CSS Insight last fall.

The Guardian newspaper in the UK has a supporting piece in which it found more than 900 Galaxy Gear watches for sale on eBay, with asking prices as low as a third of the purchase cost.

While the data may be bad news for existing smartwatch and fitness band suppliers, The Guardian has an apposite comparison with early mp3 players, which also suffered high abandonment rates a decade ago.

So lots of those early MP3 players eventually ended up in drawers; but that didn’t stop the sector becoming huge.

And the company responsible for that shift was, of course, Apple: the company which took its time getting both the device and the user-interface right.

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Comments

  1. rottenbittenfruit - 10 years ago

    I’m sorry but everyone is saying Apple is late to the game and doesn’t stand a chance in being successful selling a smartwatch. Most of the analysts claim that Android and Samsung will dominate the smartwatch business just like they do the smartphone business.

    • Where have I heard that before?

    • Ben Lovejoy - 10 years ago

      Sales vs profits …

    • o0smoothies0o - 10 years ago

      They dominate the smartphone business strictly because of the fact that they make a ridiculous number of garbage smartphones which are all able to run android. Apple on the other hand produces a couple smartphones and their OS is completely locked to themselves. It’s embarrassing and sad when people are too stupid to understand this.

      Anyway, Apple is rumored to be working on the only wearable worth producing, and that is due to the biosensors. It will be game changing because of this, and spur everyone else to copy. They are smart enough to know that a wearable has one feature which makes it worth producing, because it is constantly worn. That feature is of course the biosensors, anything and everything else, most importantly, telling you the time, is a secondary feature. Wearables should be for tracking a biological organism’s physiological functions above all else.

    • It’s about quality, not quantity. It’s about customers who actually use their device, not when they have it and do not actually use it. I mean ACTUALLY use it = I think more than 60% of Android users don’t even use their device as iOS users.

    • Robert Nixon - 10 years ago

      Kinda like everyone said Apple was late to the smartphone game and that the iPhone would be a major flop? Now, despite your claims, no one in the industry has a better-selling or more profitable phone than Apple.

    • Daniel (@dgp1) - 10 years ago

      LOL. “Analysts.” Analysts are professional guessers who are usually wrong. Also, I have seen zero compelling smart watches ever, and sales seem insignificant at this point. So, I can’t see how there is any train leaving the station that Apple is supposedly late to. Either smart watches will never take off—just like countless other attempted products that bombed, or no one has gotten it right yet.

      People have lost a lot of money betting that Apple’s entry into a given market would be unable to compete with the earlier entrants—especially when the early entrants are terrible, as was the case with Windows Mobile vs. iPhone 1. I’d put the joke Samsung “smart watch” firmly in the same useless category.

  2. unitedelectronicsgroup - 10 years ago

    It seems likely that wearable devices, including the earlier MP3s, were just trends. Every trend lose its pull fast. UEG services MP3 players, but we don’t see the wearable ones come through. This is probably because the wearable MP3s are ones we don’t service, and for good reason.

  3. rogifan - 10 years ago

    I’ve always thought wearables were basically a solution trying to find a problem. It’s basically the tech world and those Wall Street analysts who cover tech looking for “the next big thing” because they’re bored. And then you get companies like Google and Samsung that throw anything and everything out there because they want the tech media and Wall Street to think they’re on the forefront of “the next big thing”.

    • o0smoothies0o - 10 years ago

      Nope, biosensors are game changing, they are in fact the future. Intelligent people like the ones working at Apple, fully envision this future, and comprehend the incredible possibilities. It’s true that highly intelligent and visionary people see what others do not. Really, that’s what intelligence is, seeing things, understanding things, and coming up with solutions that others aren’t capable of. That is true genius.

  4. Jason Piebes - 10 years ago

    ^^ And do you believe them? With only 10% of industry profits, does Samsung dominate the smartphone industry?

  5. Mike Drips - 10 years ago

    I would buy an Apple watch. I currently have a Pebble, which ties in nicely with my iPhone, BUT Pebble sucks for support. Their last “update” crashes for everyone, and they have taken their app out of the Apple App store while it is being fixed. It has been FOUR days! Do you think Apple would take 4 days to fix such a major bug? I don’t think so.

  6. Kevin Rye (@RyeMAC3) - 10 years ago

    Apple proves time and time again to succeed where others have failed. They take they’re time to get things right. Part of that is looking at where everyone else went wrong. Look at the MacBook Air, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. There’s no doubt in my mind that the “iWatch” will succeed.

    • unitedelectronicsgroup - 10 years ago

      It is no surprising fact that Apple introduces so many devices that take off with flying colors. Years of successes substantiates that claim. As consumers, we bite every time a new piece of technology is introduced, and that is because the technology is unprecedented, perfected and well worth our investment. It is just a matter of time before the iWatch succeeds, if not the actual iWatch, then Apple’s redesigned version of it.

Author

Avatar for Ben Lovejoy Ben Lovejoy

Ben Lovejoy is a British technology writer and EU Editor for 9to5Mac. He’s known for his op-eds and diary pieces, exploring his experience of Apple products over time, for a more rounded review. He also writes fiction, with two technothriller novels, a couple of SF shorts and a rom-com!


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