Expectations of course are ridiculously high.
Besides, this one version of the watch, outsold all competitor smart-watches 10 to 1 or more...
but you're right, there's alot of revisionist history when it comes to apple product success during Jobs era. iPhone didn't become this massive product til 2010 when the 4 was released. that device changed everything for them
If we ignore the iPhone 3G, which was the top-selling mobile phone of 2008. Revisionist history indeed.
The original 2007 iPhone was hugely successful out of the gate within the smartphone category, which it shaped and then dominated for the next few years.
2010 was a tipping point for people abandoning feature phones for smartphones, and there wasn't yet a comparable Android competitor. But the seeds were sown years earlier.
>> "The original 2007 iPhone was hugely successful out of the gate within the smartphone category"
And the Apple Watch is by far the best selling smartwatch. The market just isn't that big.
I think the 3GS was when I started seeing iPhone's everywhere in the UK at least and that was definitely the first really solid device where there weren't glaring feature omissions and performance problems. The market had also come to accept the high phone prices smartphones ushered in by that point too. Everyone I knew had a great PAYG deal back then so convincing them to go to a contract and pay 3-5x what they were used to took a few versions. I think with watchOS 3.0 the software is now at that point and we're just waiting on the hardware to offer something really compelling (which I think will be health related).
Right. The fact that the smartwatch market is currently small doesn't exclude the possibility that it will grow huge, as happened with the smartphone market.
But if we want to continue with the analogy, there are other key differences between the Apple Watch and the early iPhone. I'll point out two.
First, even with the first-gen iPhone's feature omissions (its most commonly cited feature omission? No physical keyboard), the iPhone made the immense utility of the smartphone immediately obvious to most people who used it. Many people loved it. By contrast, the reaction to smartwatches from early adopters ranges mostly from cool to lukewarm.
Second, the first iPhone differentiated itself by nailing features that mattered most to most people. Compared to its leading competitors, the iPhone has 8 hours talk time vs 5 hours, 4+ GB memory vs 64 MB, 2 MP camera vs 1.3 MP, Wi-Fi vs no Wi-Fi, twice the screen size, built-in iPod functionality, etc. Nothing really came close in terms of its core features. The glaring feature omissions people complained about (no memory card slot, no physical keyboard (!), no third-party apps, no copy & paste) either turned out to be inconsequential or were obvious ways to make a great product even better. By contrast, the Apple Watch failed to identify key features that make it categorically better than the competition, and people are scratching their heads trying to think of "glaring omissions" that could make the smartwatch more essential.
The Apple Watch might have a future yet, but comparing it to the iPhone really doesn't work out in the Watch's favor.
I don't understand how people think they've tried the watch and failed. They've put out ONE version. The first iPod was Mac only and therefore didn't sell very well. When the iPhone launched you had to buy the device outright - no subsidy and it was lacking features that other phones had for quite a while. It was a few versions before it really took off. I think people shrugging off the watch are being incredibly short sighted (and I say this as someone who had one and sold it). It's not perfect for a mass market now but it can be. The software changes in watchOS 3 are really going to help towards that but in the long term this thing could become essential to your health and from interviews Tim Cook has done in the past it sounds like that's the direction they want to go once they've got the basic software and form factor down.