Both failed badly to live up to Apple's sales expectations.

The Sunflower iMac was discontinued even before its successor shipped.

The Apple Watch Edition was supposed to grow Apple into a luxury brand and expand its margins massively (you can find many interviews with Jony Ive from 2015 where he explains this thinking). This strategy was a dud.

The AWE strategy failed, yet now the AW (like the iPad) define the category they are in. AV could be similar. Apple doesn't know which use case will take off, but it has to get it out there to find out. Leading with the best hardware they have right now lets developers go wild.

Have you looked at the revenue from their wearables category? If the Watch is a failure then the Mac is an abject failure.

You need to seriously read what you’re actually replying to instead of what you think you are because you keep bringing up that the AW is not a failure when nobody said it was.

> Newton, Power Mac Cube, iMac G4 "Sunflower", and solid gold first-gen Apple Watch come to mind as Apple hardware products that failed to live up to the hype.

No one seriously thought that the Apple Watch was going to be an iPhone size hit. It’s a complete straw man argument.

Do you understand what "solid gold first-gen Apple Watch" means? Or, in the other comment, "Apple Watch Edition"?

It does not mean what you clearly think it means.

It was a pet project for Ives. Do you really think that Apple didn’t know their target market well enough to think that they wouldn’t be selling millions of $10K watches?

That would be a perfectly acceptable comment... 3 comments ago.

Instead, you pretended as if they said AW as an entire category was a failure.

Next time, reply to what is written in the comment, not what is easier to argue against.

It’s a perfectly acceptable comment now. No one in their right mind thought there Apple had realistic expectations of selling 10 of millions of slow 1st generation $10K watches. It was a straw man argument that I really didn’t think that people took seriously

> No one in their right mind thought there Apple had realistic expectations of selling 10 of millions of slow 1st generation $10K watches

This is not and has never been the bar for "failure". Stop pretending it is just because it makes your argument easier.

The comment you replied to states:

> The Apple Watch Edition was supposed to grow Apple into a luxury brand and expand its margins massively (you can find many interviews with Jony Ive from 2015 where he explains this thinking). This strategy was a dud.

Show how this specific thing is untrue, not your own definition of failure. Was that not Apple's play with the AWE? Was it not a failure, almost immediately discontinued? What exact part of that statement is false?

This is the real strawman and your projection is plainly obvious.

There was no world where a few $10K Apple Watch was going to “expand Apple’s margins” meaningfully compared to the number of iPhones Apple sells. Apple knew this. Anyone who knows anything about finance or simple math knows this.

Got it, so you're just making it up and moving goalposts along the way.

At least you make it plainly obvious.