Apple Watch: Time will tell
NEW YORK – For all those who hailed the iPhone as the “Jesus Phone” in 2007, the Apple Watch’s arrival has hardly been the second coming.
Sure, it can do many useful, even delightful things, such as showing incoming texts and email, tracking heart rates during exercise or sending digital doodles to friends. But is that enough to spend $350 or more, especially when it requires wearing a watch again while still carrying an iPhone around?
Early Apple Watch owners seem generally happy with it, but Apple’s bigger worry should be those on the sidelines – even hardcore Apple fans, not to mention everybody else – who are waiting to take the plunge.
The wait-and-see attitude is not exactly helping investor sentiment. Apple hasn’t released Apple Watch sales figures, but the company’s quarterly financial report Tuesday suggests they were lower than many Wall Street analysts expected, though Apple said they exceeded internal projections.
A bigger worry for investors: iPhone sales, which at $31 billion account for more than half of Apple’s business.
IPhone sales are still growing rapidly, but the pace of growth is slowing. Worries about the iPhone’s momentum sent Apple’s stock down nearly 5 percent, knocking about $36 billion off the company’s market capitalization.
Among people holding off on the watch, some say they are waiting for early kinks to be worked out and others, for an “aha moment.”
“It’s been cast as a want, not a need,” said Matt Quick, a Topeka, Kansas, engineer and Apple fan who is holding off on getting one. “I’m kind of waiting to see what next year’s model will bring.”
Patrick Clayton, who has had Mac computers all his life and owns an iPhone and several iPads, returned his Apple Watch after three weeks. The last straw? It nagged the physically active New Yorker to stand up during a six-hour flight.
“Apple is famous for telling us what we need before we need them,” Clayton said. “I thought this would be the case with the watch. But it (just) added something to my life that I didn’t need added.”
That’s not to say the Apple Watch is a bomb.
Most analysts and tech reviewers, including the Associated Press, see promise, especially compared with rival smartwatches from Samsung and others. Wristly, a research company created to study the watch, found that early buyers are overwhelmingly satisfied, more so than with the original iPad and iPhone.
And of the more than a dozen early Apple Watch owners interviewed by the AP by phone, email or in person, most of them love their watch. After all, early adopters of new technologies tend to understand that what they’re getting isn’t perfect.
“I’d recommend it to people with an open mind,” said Dennis Falkenstein, of Danville, California. He said the watch gets him “everything I want” such as local temperature, or the current time in Japan, where many of his business clients are.