Apple Watch Predicted to Capture 50% Market Share in 2016 on 14 Million Sales

A market to watch.

And yet every time I read a story about the watch, people call it a flop and say Tim should either resign for it or discontinue the product. Amazing. :rolleyes:

I think some people have unrealistic expectations and expect sales to immediately reach iPhone levels.

It IS a flop in Apple standards, regarding Apples undenibale ambitions this being the next big thing after iPod, iPhone and iPad. The curse of an unparalleled success story in the last 15 years.

However, even this is not true. Even by Apple standards the Apple Watch is not a flop, matching or exceeding previous 1st generation products FROM APPLE. The myth about the Apple Watch "flop" is so prevalent on MacRumors even those who think they are defending the Apple Watch (or pretend to be) repeat it.

Apple bashers on this forum used to decry the Steve Jobs "Reality Distortion Field." It is safe to say Steve Jobs was not the only personality capable of distorting reality. The MacRumors forum membership has collectively achieved an equally powerful distortion of reality.

Congrats to Apple, but now we do need a WatchOS 3.0 that delivers:
- A LOT of watch faces and adaptability
- a gui that does make sense
- more SIRI actions with the Apple Watch (dictating notes, etc.)
- rating music
- displaying html mails
- speed!
- buttons that can be assigned (or at least buttons that do make sense due to frequent usage ("friends" does not do it and Apple Pay is not available in my country as it isn't in 97% of the countries world-wide...)

And yet every time I read a story about the watch, people call it a flop and say Tim should either resign for it or discontinue the product. Amazing. :rolleyes:

I think the Apple Watch is the first smart watch that has just enough of all the bits you need to make a good smart watch. It has a cool look, quite customisable with good and growing software support.

When I look at the other smart watches I see only one of these characteristics. They either look nice and don't do much (Android Watches) or they have a nice user interface, good software but no long term developer support (Tizen Samsung watch) or they have a long battery life but don't look very appealing (Pebble Time).

And of course there are fitness bands which are trying to come at the wearable from a different angle and most of those either don't look nice or don't do much.

Now having said that, I don't think the current Apple Watch (which I own by the way) is ready for the mainstream. I think it's still very much an early adopters device. It needs to be faster and it needs to be more consistent in performing the small number of tasks it has been designed for.

I think perhaps by the 3rd iteration it'll be something I could recommend to other people. Right now I say to people who ask, only get it if you're going to use the fitness stuff because beyond that it doesn't do much well and you'll find yourself reaching for your iPhone to use Siri and its other features just due to how slow and inconsistent the watch is right now, one example of that is even now notifications are still inconsistent on mine. Restores, reboots etc nothing fixes it. Sometimes you'll get notifications consistently for a few days on the Watch and other times they'll go 50/50 to the iPhone so it's not really bug free yet either in my usage and I have owned two so far.

Overall I do like mine a lot, I'm a runner and the fitness stuff is great and the other features are enjoyable to use when they work consistently, I'm sure Watch OS 2.2 and Watch OS 3 will further refine the experience, there is no doubt in my mind that it will become the de-facto standard by which other smart watches are judged if it hasn't already.