The Apple Watch has a big advantage: it's one of the cheapest things they sell. It is the iPod Shuffle of its time. But as it doesn't work without an iPhone, I cannot agree that it owns the market.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/910862/worldwide-smartwa...
Apple came in quite late and slurped up much of the market. If their watch was Android-compatible, it'd be even more.
I don't know if they've been able to pull this off with AVP, as most people are just ignoring it.
I think if you personally are ignoring it, you probably don't notice how much other people aren't.
That said, I can't think of any of my friends who I would recommend to buy one at this stage, but I see Apple having no trouble selling as many as they can make.
So right now, the entire AR/VR category is expected to ship 1/3 of the number of units of just the Apple Watch. Even if Apple sells 180,000 AVPs all with an MSRP of $4000 (so I'm being extra generous here), that's only $720m in revenue, or less than 3.7% of Apple Watch sales.
And that doesn't even factor in all the Apple Watch units that are in use, which realistically, is probably 125 - 150 million units.
Does that mean AVP or headsets like it won't ever achieve Apple Watch-like sales or adoption? Not at all. But it certainly isn't now and it's probably doing the category a disservice to expect it to reach those heights anytime soon, let alone pretend that just because awareness is super high that sales are guaranteed to follow.
[1]: https://www.idc.com/promo/arvr [2]: https://medium.com/@mingchikuo/apple-watch-estimates-and-pre...
But right now, supply-chain analysts suggest that they can only make 160,000 or something this year. Apple could sell literal boxes of dog shit to 160,000 people, so I don't think we really know what the size of the market is.(And incidentally, although shipping is now two or three weeks out (an improvement from two weeks ago), I can pick up an AVP from a number of stores in my area today and at another store on Saturday. I don't think we can make any assessments as to the market size/demand right now, but I will say that in-store availability one-week post release was not something we saw for the first iPad or Apple Watch. The iPad 2 was consistently out of stock its first few months, even -- and not because they were supply constrained but because Apple sold every device they got in-store.)
Is interest/intrigue/vauge knowledge super high -- yes -- it's a new Apple product, that's a given. But prodct awareness != product success.
WatchOS until like fall 2016 really wasn't that great. The third-party apps were all garbage and we didn't even get "native" apps until six months after the device launched and that original Apple Watch (the Series 0) was woefully underpowered for what it needed to be. I bought one and don't regret spending $800 on the stainless steel variant with the modern buckle combo, but it also got like two years of software support, and even the support was limited compared to even the low-cost Series 1 released a year later.
AirPods...I have about 6 different "true wireless headphones". AirPods IMO worse than cheap version of Pixel Buds that google give away for free just for existing. Max and Pro are alright, but the original and 2nd gen AirPods are my least favorite headphones.
Their nice seamless device migration is nice, but only possible because they control all sides of it. Also, doesn't work well if connected to Apple TV for some reason - doesn't automatically switch when you pickup the phone.
For Airpods I fell for the hype in a moment of need and weakness: I needed new earbuds for a travel because they couldn't swap my old ones that needed a warranty return. I regreted it pretty fast after the honeymoon period. Sure, they wouldn't drop too much and the 2 buds were perfectly in sync (but that's a low bar to clear for earbuds...) but most of the rest sucked big time. In fact, their poor battery life made me regret the wire pretty fast and their mild sound quality doesn't really help being more forgiving of its shortcomings. Nowadays they make no sense for their price, and the "Pro" version is alright, but to get half decent battery life they had to increased case size wich was basically the only useful difference and in the end, they perform like buds half their price for sure. I think the iCloud sync bullshit to be unreliable and a stupid "feature" at that because it guarantees that it will only be useful with other Apple products when I definitely do not want to limit my tech to only one brand especially when said brand only sells at luxury pricing... What you really want is Bluetooth multipoint, a feature that many earbuds at this price have anyway.
I bought the Watch to track swimming because it seemed like the thing that would integrate easier with iOS and it seemed not too bad quality tracking. But in the end after years of using an Apple Watch for sports tracking (including thousands kms of running) I don't think the Watch is really good and most will get it to show off or because it's actually the only that can properly integrate with iOS thanks to limitations put in place by Apple themselves. Considering the price, the only really useful features (health/sports tracking) is extremely lacking, especially if you do not spend time looking for 3rd party solutions. The only reason it got such success is because of Apple brand recognition and other secondary factors like social status. In the end it's not a completely terrible product but if evaluated on its own at its price point its really not great...
Suffise to say I'm rather disenchanted with today's Apple gear and I feel they really need to make their products MUCH better for the price or lower pricing across the board. In the long term something will have to give because people won't be captivated by the brand forever and désillusion has already started.
They do, but not as good as within apple ecosystem. My only gripe is how it works together with ATV.
Fitness tracking, I think it's a subset of what I said before: it isn't a fitness tracker, but an iPhone wearable that can be used to track some fitness things. Yeah, Ultra has some niche features, but I got just because it has bigger screen.
To use a few examples that have happened after Apple Maps:
* The Apple Watch — Apple was at least 2 years behind other smartwatches when it launched in 2015 and now it basically owns the category. The first version wasn’t quite there but they nailed it with the series 2 and the pivot from fashion to fitness.
* AirPods - tons of companies had been trying truly wireless headphones for years. I know, I had tested basically every option commercially available. Although imperfect at launch (and the software got better over time for once here), AirPods from the moment I first used them in September of 2016 was category defining and the absolute best truly wireless earbuds you could get on the market, at any price point — even tho the quality was mid. Even now, you can do better than standard AirPods for the price/performance, but it’s hard to top AirPods Pro 2s unless you want to spend significantly more money and sacrifice ecosystem niceties (assuming you’re an iOS user. And the Venn diagram between people who are willing to spend over $250 on truly wireless earbuds and iPhone users is basically a circle).
What I do think is instructive about the Apple Maps example is that when it does come to services, and I put generative AI in the services camp much more than hardware, is that Apple is not best-in class at services at all. As a package, Apple services can be beneficial, especially if you’re part of the ecosystem - but even tho I pay Apple $38 a month for Apple One Premier, I’m still paying separately for Spotify, Dropbox, OneDrive (part of Office 365 but still), and Netflix (and a bunch of other video services) and I don’t think I could reasonably drop any of those services in-place of just using iCloud/Apple TV/Apple Music, etc. My parents can (except for Netflix/prime video), and Apple services are definitely “good enough” for a lot of people in the ecosystem, but none are best-in-class.
Unclear if they’d be able to be “good enough” to displace other generative AI services here or not, but to your point, Apple Maps still hasn’t gotten over its bad launch. And Siri on the phone is still dog shit. Siri is so bad that I won’t even use it on platforms where it is objectively good, like Apple TV, unless I specifically remember to.