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Apple Watch Captured Estimated 75% Smartwatch Market Share in Launch Quarter
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So having something nice is suitable justification to get attacked? Like women are asking to be raped? Land of the free?
If our local dollar hadn't tanked, I would have even bought this first gen device. Now I'm not sure if I can justify even future ones as the phone and computer prices have gone up hundreds. I'll be hanging on to the 5s, iPhone4, pad4 and 2011 MacBook Pro. I'd still like a watch as it would be very useful, but I don't see it becoming affordable here.
I most certainly agree.
You've got a great setup now, it's very hard to justify (in my opinion) the outlay of big bucks for a watch that is nothing more than an extension of the iPhone and requires constant daily attention (charging and app updates).
Apple Watch offers very little other than a lot of curious superficial entertainment for those who don't mind spending their time that way. The public in general doesn't seem to be amused or compelled by this device.
Considering that Apple's clients have more money, and tend to spend more of it, its a high possibility that the numbers won't track the OS shares; though since Android watches are in general much much cheaper (and crappier), they will eventually pass Apple for that reason alone (just like Android passed IOS because of cheap phones and hundreds of makers).
It seems it is fair to say that Apple did it again. Apple Watch is not their big earner, but they have started a trend. Apple Watch is sexy enough to attract women to buy it, none of the others did (certainly not in a big way). The Motorola 360 got lots of media support, despite its shortcomings, but I have never seen a single one out in the wild.
Coming up with something positive about Apple, perhaps?
It might happen one day, I will make sure to have an Apple Watch to tap my wrist when it happens when I am in my retirement home...
Really ?.. My wife Has an s6, is she a poor relation.. On contract it's every bit as costly as my ip6 , I'm getting tired of these pointless stereotypes.. In the UK, the iPhone is becoming like the ugg boot, or the Burberry baseball cap.. Something for the chavs....
Good grief, I didn't say everyone that buys Android is poorer, I'm talking about global stats here, not individual variations; I don't give a crap about anecdotes. Fact is that Galaxy and Note sales have fallen through the floor so I'm not sure why you'd even bring that up, it doesn't help your argument. Apple has made 92% of all smart phone profits and a massive amount of revenue despite only having 18% of the world wide phones. That should tell you something about where the money lies.
I'm sure you know how to use Google to find out the facts behind the demos of Android owners vs IOS owners.
The ASP of Android phones is hundreds of dollars less than IOS phones, that's also a fact you can verify handily.
As already noted, I said no such thing. In fact, I have often said that it sold just fine.
By that time, the Apple Watch WILL be your wrist
Seriously, after over thirty years of being online, one thing has never changed: there are always a few people who resort to personal attacks instead of debating with facts.
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True, many are designed to be affordable to purchasers without subsidies, a market that Apple seems to have no interest in.
It doesn't matter whether a group is rich or poor. All around the world, it's a known phenomenon that people tend to limit their upfront cost to $200 - $250. Look at the US and UK. Heck, look at Japan where the iPhone didn't take off until it was nearly free.
Fortunately for Apple, about half the carriers in the world do have subsidies. Without them, there would be far fewer iPhone sales, and much lower profits.
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I keep reading in these fora that "no one wears watches any more"; but that can hardly be true, with giant companies like Seiko, Swatch, Citizen, Orient and others selling millions of them every year. Not to mention the high end vendors like Rolex, Girard-Perregaux, IWC, Blancpain, Audemars, Patek-Philippe and literally dozens of others across a wide spectrum of price and quality.
My observation about young people is that they eschew watches up to the point where they get a real job, and then they tend to get them.
Even if the Apple Watch is just an iPhone accessory, every new generation of iPhones, some 40 or 50 million customers, increases the potential market for the Watch by increasing the number of Watch-compatible phones among themselves and the users of compatible hand-me-downs and buyers of upgraded iPhones 5 and higher. Many among this already large and vastly increasing number will find the Watch useful enough to spend the relatively modest $350 to $700 to avail themselves of the added utility of the Watch.
It was a no-brainer for me and the many benefits of this incredibly versatile device have more than justified my decision.
My observation about young people is that they eschew watches up to the point where they get a real job, and then they tend to get them.
Even if the Apple Watch is just an iPhone accessory, every new generation of iPhones, some 40 or 50 million customers, increases the potential market for the Watch by increasing the number of Watch-compatible phones among themselves and the users of compatible hand-me-downs and buyers of upgraded iPhones 5 and higher. Many among this already large and vastly increasing number will find the Watch useful enough to spend the relatively modest $350 to $700 to avail themselves of the added utility of the Watch.
It was a no-brainer for me and the many benefits of this incredibly versatile device have more than justified my decision.
I know precisely one person that wears a watch. It's my brother. He loves Apple products and is a gadget maniac but he couldn't justify spending 819 euro on the model he wanted (Apple Watch 42mm, Milanese strap) so he bought himself a 175 euro watch. Don't know the brand. It doesn't measure his heartbeat or fitness level, but it's pretty good at showing time even if you don't raise your wrist and the battery will last years. And in Poland 179 euro for a watch is already considered expensive.
As for me, 99 euro is the maximum I'm ready to spend, so I'm obviously not the target group for Apple Watch.
As for me, 99 euro is the maximum I'm ready to spend, so I'm obviously not the target group for Apple Watch.
It is the result of deep reflection. The train of thought goes roughly like this: "I don't wear a watch. No one wears a watch anymore."
Am I the only one who thinks it's weird when folk bang on about profit margins as if they personally get to keep these large sums of money for themselves.. A large margin means one thing.. The consumer is getting fleeced....
I'd say capturing 78% of the market within 90 days would count as success.. What, you disagree?
It's a senseless comparison. The Apple Watch doesn't work on other phones, and most watches meant to work with other phones don't work on iOS.
The competition for the iOS phone companion watch market is basically what? Pebble, Garmin, Martian, Withers (anybody with others please jump in). The percentage of that market is what's somewhat meaningful.
And even then, it's not a fair competition, since Apple withholds critical integration to themselves. E.g. how would any competing watch support Apple Pay, or even app extensions.
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Not going to happen. It's annoying, fun and fashionable to disrespect Apple products. Win-win-win. Especially if you work for a competitor or you prefer a competitor's ecosystem. Even if you might admire the watch, the fact that it's necessarily linked to an iPhone for functionality means you'd have to think about getting an iPhone to get in on the Apple watch gig. I can understand where my nephew, say, might find that extremely difficult. He's pretty analytical about matters having to do with gear, but if he saw Apple watch jump way out in a gen 2, he'd still have a hard time going there and it wouldn't be about the watch. It would be about having to ditch his other smartphone and its apps. He'd do it if he saw the advantage to his life in making that move. Still, there's part of him that just likes to josh me about having Apple gear and he'd be very very distressed to give that up!!
So there's a face saving thing that has to be overcome for some people to switch. Apple can see that. They ran their Apple vs. PC ads to help people get past it. Stay tuned...They're not necessarily clueless. Wearables are still a dicey bit of computing markets, although I expect that to change as chips shrink and the world at large becomes more automated.
But maybe some analysts also just envy traders being in the spotlight (some for the wrong reasons, admittedly) compared to relative oblivion of being analysts, so some may pitch "flop" to stand out in the crowd. And remember the old saw about how even a broken watch is right twice a day (in 12 hour context), well there's some of that running around in financial analysis circles.
It's what makes markets anyway; someone has to believe a price is right for selling while someone else believes it's right for buying. The analyst who leans on Apple today maybe will like to see that price drop to where his firm's clients (or his firm's trading desk) jumps all over it. There's a difference between dissing a stock and actually short-selling it. I'm the the group that thinks talk is cheap. So is anyone who bought Apple for ten, twelve bucks back in the 90s and hung onto it. They've probably long since cashed out the cost of whatever they bought and everything they hold onto now is just gravy. Nice cushion for Apple when these brief post-earnings plunges take place.
No one has ever been able to guarantee anything except that change is inevitable. "Evolve or die" seem to be the options. Evolving fast enough and managing to survive, those are the challenges.
The planet Venus was resurfaced one afternoon while someone was maybe picking out new carpet. Venus said "How about beige" and that was that. All the comfy old craters she'd acquired throughout her history were gone! No need for carpet. No need for historians to write anything down, either. No historians! All that humans know about it for sure, so far, is that the planet's surface is a lot younger than the planet.
So no one was waiting for a smartphone like the one that Apple suddenly produced. Same with tablets. Jobs even dissed tablets at one point, probably while they were tweaking their design for the iPad on the Apple drawing boards... can't fault him for trying to slow down the competition ahead of time. Now some of us are anticipating an iPad Pro, or paying down their credit cards for a refurb iPad Air 2 (me), or they just can't resist getting the new iPod touch (also me) while the wait for the next surprise in tablets goes on.
Apple has long since realized each product line has its own upgrade cycle tendencies. The iPhone is their flagship, iPad runs sort of tangentially to that but probably only because portability is a little more limited for guys not wearing cargo pants, and also because tablet computing is still (temporarily, imo) throttled compared to OS on desktops. The notebooks get updated more often than desktops. I would expect smartphones to continue being updated more often than tablets for the next five or six years. As time goes on, Apple gets better at syncing its releases with people's willingness to upgrade particular products. Their development costs sink as iterations continue so they can afford to put up a new color of shuffles now and then, or tweak some newer goodness into an iPod touch. Same with iPads. I wouldn't worry about tablets disappearing, they are huge in the corporate market and that will only continue: once they bite, they're hooked.
iPad sales are down because people still love their old iPads. The upgrade cycle is similar to PCs.
I agree with others here who think the iPad cycle is more akin to that of notebooks and that the watch might eventually fall into that category as well. Which imo is another argument for a high margin; I don't expect quality goods for the price of lower quality merchandise but that irrational expectation does exist in the marketplace and a company has to play the role of the grownup in the room sometimes.
Even when I was 20, I knew not to buy cheap goods if I needed them to last a long time. Today a lot of people seem to think everything should be cheap, but they will treat everything as if designed to be driven over by their SUV. People like that may not be able to distinguish good from poor quality. I am not surprised they complain about price of Apple gear vs stuff of less expensive manufacture.
I've been buying Apple gear since Macintosh 512k, but I don't buy one every year. Every two or three years is my speed on notebooks, but I love it that when I do upgrade, my previous one is in fine condition and can be handed on in working shape for someone else to drive into the ground (which can take a decade sometimes, since not everyone needs enough computing power to run a city from a laptop).
With Apple, it's been great to see that software has generously supported a few cycles back in hardware. When you finally can't update your software, you know it's time to spring for newer gear. Seems fair enough, and it has worked out great for me. I'd expect that to hold true for the watch but as we get closer to being able to see those very very small chips in commercial use, that cycle may close up some because everyone would love to see a thinner watch.
Having 75% of the market is impressive. Will it continue? Yes. The apps, battery tech advancement and tinier chips will drive the thing. The younger generations are more health-conscious than us old geezers. The apps we can't even envision yet are being brainstormed as I write this post. The iPhone knocked the socks off the smartphone market. That was before there were many apps past games to demo, and most of us thought having a music player and a phone that "just worked" was pretty cool. Fast forward a few generations of hardware and software and creative app rollouts. Can't remember when a phone was just a phone? Nor can I. Et voila, give the watch a couple gens and then let's do the thread again.
Yeah, it's almost human...
See below.
Exactly.
Because, Apple.
Hammer on the stock when earnings are released or a new product is rumored, launched, seen in the wild... if enough people join in the fun, perhaps they can drive the stock down far enough to then be able to buy in on the cheap, ride the upcurve and sell when the rumors of the NEXT "one more thing" are leaked. It may seem counterintuitive as hell but it's fun to, uh.. watch. It has been going on with Apple now for decades. Every time they come to market with something, or don't come to market with something, the death knell sounds anew. It's just a bunch of people trying to get in on the ground floor by lowering the ceiling and jumping off the roof. To each his own. The rest opt for "buy and hold" which has its own pitfalls and potholes, but if you're young, I'd hang onto Apple long enough to recover the cost, party on some and then hang onto the rest as a gravy train. Full disclosure: I own a very few shares. And, I am pretty old.
Well actually a high margin can mean a couple other things. It can mean anticipation of not sellling enough of an original iteration of a product to offset the entire cost of having developed the thing. Not that uncommon in tech gear. Early adopters of Apple gear still mostly show up for the new thing but we're living in dicey economic times and a lot of the money for tech gear comes from young professionals or from baby boomer parents with kids in school or kids just out of school with no jobs. That whole category is either debt-strapped or wary of taking on more debt. Apple can't be ignoring that in its calculations. The economy is recovering and Apple's likely to go with a gen 2 of the watch but in the meantime they'd be nuts not to have a high margin on the original watch.
Another and more common reason for having a high margin on a particular item: It's offsetting losses in an ancillary service or in another product line, e.g., when your supermarket sells you peppers at 88c / lb it's taking a real beating, but it got you in the door and it hopes you will also buy a plastic dishwashing brush for an incredibly overpriced $5, which will not only cover its loss on cost of the peppers but also make a profit on the brush AND let it sock away some dough for a rainy day.
Bottom line, a company is in business to make a buck and it will try to do that by getting you into the store and showing you some merchandise for you to buy if you want to do that. Today you have to show a customer some deals, so probably whatever's not a deal is going to be carrying some freight in its price. So, caveat emptor. So okay, I'll let you figure out what are the equivalent of Apple's plastic brushes, but they could be any product lines that sell well to an expected niche but are not currently likely to break out of that niche. Maybe the desktops. Maybe the high end laptops.
Let's talk about that "rainy day" money in the profit margin for a minute. One kind of rainy day is when you put a low margin or loss-making price on something and no one comes to your sale. Usually that's when people have figured out that you charge too much for everything not explicitly marked with a SALE! price. Apple's not there yet, because as others here have pointed out, their gear is built to last and holds up very well. But, they could be getting there on price sensitivity. It depends on whether people stay interested in paying more for quality and whether they think they are getting what they paid for. Scaling up to volume of demand while maintaining quality is sometimes very difficult, as Apple has already discovered in at least some past iterations of the iPhone and notebooks. Time will tell
with successive iterations of the Apple watch, assuming they got their price points right and so end up selling enough of gen 1 to go around again. They've done this exact kind of guesstimate over and over before, and successfully, so I wouldn't bet against them.-
Wow, that's a reply.. I can see 100% why Apple charge as much as they can.. Its to maximise revenue to the hilt.. Same as all business.. They would charge more of they thought they would get away with it.. But it's the mindset that profits means quality .. When comparing rival products, Which is bobbins..Not going to happen. It's annoying, fun and fashionable to disrespect Apple products. Win-win-win. Especially if you work for a competitor or you prefer a competitor's ecosystem. Even if you might admire the watch, the fact that it's necessarily linked to an iPhone for functionality means you'd have to think about getting an iPhone to get in on the Apple watch gig. I can understand where my nephew, say, might find that extremely difficult. He's pretty analytical about matters having to do with gear, but if he saw Apple watch jump way out in a gen 2, he'd still have a hard time going there and it wouldn't be about the watch. It would be about having to ditch his other smartphone and its apps. He'd do it if he saw the advantage to his life in making that move. Still, there's part of him that just likes to josh me about having Apple gear and he'd be very very distressed to give that up!! So there's a face saving thing that has to be overcome for some people to switch. Apple can see that. They ran their Apple vs. PC ads to help people get past it. Stay tuned...
They're not necessarily clueless. Wearables are still a dicey bit of computing markets, although I expect that to change as chips shrink and the world at large becomes more automated.
But maybe some analysts also just envy traders being in the spotlight (some for the wrong reasons, admittedly) compared to relative oblivion of being analysts, so some may pitch "flop" to stand out in the crowd. And remember the old saw about how even a broken watch is right twice a day (in 12 hour context), well there's some of that running around in financial analysis circles.
It's what makes markets anyway; someone has to believe a price is right for selling while someone else believes it's right for buying. The analyst who leans on Apple today maybe will like to see that price drop to where his firm's clients (or his firm's trading desk) jumps all over it. There's a difference between dissing a stock and actually short-selling it. I'm the the group that thinks talk is cheap. So is anyone who bought Apple for ten, twelve bucks back in the 90s and hung onto it. They've probably long since cashed out the cost of whatever they bought and everything they hold onto now is just gravy. Nice cushion for Apple when these brief post-earnings plunges take place.
No one has ever been able to guarantee anything except that change is inevitable. "Evolve or die" seem to be the options. Evolving fast enough and managing to survive, those are the challenges.
The planet Venus was resurfaced one afternoon while someone was maybe picking out new carpet. Venus said "How about beige" and that was that. All the comfy old craters she'd acquired throughout her history were gone! No need for carpet. No need for historians to write anything down, either. No historians! All that humans know about it for sure, so far, is that the planet's surface is a lot younger than the planet.
So no one was waiting for a smartphone like the one that Apple suddenly produced. Same with tablets. Jobs even dissed tablets at one point, probably while they were tweaking their design for the iPad on the Apple drawing boards... can't fault him for trying to slow down the competition ahead of time. Now some of us are anticipating an iPad Pro, or paying down their credit cards for a refurb iPad Air 2 (me), or they just can't resist getting the new iPod touch (also me) while the wait for the next surprise in tablets goes on.
Apple has long since realized each product line has its own upgrade cycle tendencies. The iPhone is their flagship, iPad runs sort of tangentially to that but probably only because portability is a little more limited for guys not wearing cargo pants, and also because tablet computing is still (temporarily, imo) throttled compared to OS on desktops. The notebooks get updated more often than desktops. I would expect smartphones to continue being updated more often than tablets for the next five or six years. As time goes on, Apple gets better at syncing its releases with people's willingness to upgrade particular products. Their development costs sink as iterations continue so they can afford to put up a new color of shuffles now and then, or tweak some newer goodness into an iPod touch. Same with iPads. I wouldn't worry about tablets disappearing, they are huge in the corporate market and that will only continue: once they bite, they're hooked.
I agree with others here who think the iPad cycle is more akin to that of notebooks and that the watch might eventually fall into that category as well. Which imo is another argument for a high margin; I don't expect quality goods for the price of lower quality merchandise but that irrational expectation does exist in the marketplace and a company has to play the role of the grownup in the room sometimes.
Even when I was 20, I knew not to buy cheap goods if I needed them to last a long time. Today a lot of people seem to think everything should be cheap, but they will treat everything as if designed to be driven over by their SUV. People like that may not be able to distinguish good from poor quality. I am not surprised they complain about price of Apple gear vs stuff of less expensive manufacture.
I've been buying Apple gear since Macintosh 512k, but I don't buy one every year. Every two or three years is my speed on notebooks, but I love it that when I do upgrade, my previous one is in fine condition and can be handed on in working shape for someone else to drive into the ground (which can take a decade sometimes, since not everyone needs enough computing power to run a city from a laptop).
With Apple, it's been great to see that software has generously supported a few cycles back in hardware. When you finally can't update your software, you know it's time to spring for newer gear. Seems fair enough, and it has worked out great for me. I'd expect that to hold true for the watch but as we get closer to being able to see those very very small chips in commercial use, that cycle may close up some because everyone would love to see a thinner watch.
Having 75% of the market is impressive. Will it continue? Yes. The apps, battery tech advancement and tinier chips will drive the thing. The younger generations are more health-conscious than us old geezers. The apps we can't even envision yet are being brainstormed as I write this post. The iPhone knocked the socks off the smartphone market. That was before there were many apps past games to demo, and most of us thought having a music player and a phone that "just worked" was pretty cool. Fast forward a few generations of hardware and software and creative app rollouts. Can't remember when a phone was just a phone? Nor can I. Et voila, give the watch a couple gens and then let's do the thread again.
Yeah, it's almost human...
See below.
Exactly.
Because, Apple.
Hammer on the stock when earnings are released or a new product is rumored, launched, seen in the wild... if enough people join in the fun, perhaps they can drive the stock down far enough to then be able to buy in on the cheap, ride the upcurve and sell when the rumors of the NEXT "one more thing" are leaked. It may seem counterintuitive as hell but it's fun to, uh.. watch. It has been going on with Apple now for decades. Every time they come to market with something, or don't come to market with something, the death knell sounds anew. It's just a bunch of people trying to get in on the ground floor by lowering the ceiling and jumping off the roof. To each his own. The rest opt for "buy and hold" which has its own pitfalls and potholes, but if you're young, I'd hang onto Apple long enough to recover the cost, party on some and then hang onto the rest as a gravy train. Full disclosure: I own a very few shares. And, I am pretty old.
Well actually a high margin can mean a couple other things. It can mean anticipation of not sellling enough of an original iteration of a product to offset the entire cost of having developed the thing. Not that uncommon in tech gear. Early adopters of Apple gear still mostly show up for the new thing but we're living in dicey economic times and a lot of the money for tech gear comes from young professionals or from baby boomer parents with kids in school or kids just out of school with no jobs. That whole category is either debt-strapped or wary of taking on more debt. Apple can't be ignoring that in its calculations. The economy is recovering and Apple's likely to go with a gen 2 of the watch but in the meantime they'd be nuts not to have a high margin on the original watch.
Another and more common reason for having a high margin on a particular item: It's offsetting losses in an ancillary service or in another product line, e.g., when your supermarket sells you peppers at 88c / lb it's taking a real beating, but it got you in the door and it hopes you will also buy a plastic dishwashing brush for an incredibly overpriced $5, which will not only cover its loss on cost of the peppers but also make a profit on the brush AND let it sock away some dough for a rainy day.
Bottom line, a company is in business to make a buck and it will try to do that by getting you into the store and showing you some merchandise for you to buy if you want to do that. Today you have to show a customer some deals, so probably whatever's not a deal is going to be carrying some freight in its price. So, caveat emptor. So okay, I'll let you figure out what are the equivalent of Apple's plastic brushes, but they could be any product lines that sell well to an expected niche but are not currently likely to break out of that niche. Maybe the desktops. Maybe the high end laptops.
Let's talk about that "rainy day" money in the profit margin for a minute. One kind of rainy day is when you put a low margin or loss-making price on something and no one comes to your sale. Usually that's when people have figured out that you charge too much for everything not explicitly marked with a SALE! price. Apple's not there yet, because as others here have pointed out, their gear is built to last and holds up very well. But, they could be getting there on price sensitivity. It depends on whether people stay interested in paying more for quality and whether they think they are getting what they paid for. Scaling up to volume of demand while maintaining quality is sometimes very difficult, as Apple has already discovered in at least some past iterations of the iPhone and notebooks. Time will tell with successive iterations of the Apple watch, assuming they got their price points right and so end up selling enough of gen 1 to go around again. They've done this exact kind of guesstimate over and over before, and successfully, so I wouldn't bet against them.
Wow in the new format for these forums, now I see why people double post instead of multiquoting posts to which they wish to reply. I did not realize my quoted posts would not in turn be carried into replies to my post. Live and learn...
Anyway, in response to your post:
There's no way to sell "Apple's drawing board" separately from products created on that board. Who feels like sending Apple $30 this afternoon because they might design something nice in the future? Not me!
There's no way to sell world class customer service separately from products supported by Apple, either. Who would send them a thin dime to pick up the phone for some other customer whose phone seems not to work this afternoon? Not me. I have the option to pay extra for AppleCare or AppleCare+ when I buy a particular product, but that's not the same as paying for Apple's basic service on a purchased product, and that service is superb whether I buy a $50 shuffle or a $1500 laptop.
So how about if I pay a premium on gear I do buy in order to have good designers stay at Apple to make more stuff like the great stuff I've bought, and good customer service in case I need it for that piece of gear that happens to arrive DOA some day? Sounds right to me. It has worked out fine for me too.
The profit margins may be high on some of Apple's gear but there's a reason for that. It allows the the company to have an overall bottom line that lets it make a profit AND to afford to invest in what has made Apple gear great to begin with, which is good design, good execution, good customer support. I don't imagine those features are cost-free, not for one minute.
You get what you pay for. You pay for the entire experience of gear you buy. You have to pay for the behind-scenes development and service, unless you don't mind it becoming more of a hassle than an enhancement. Those hidden costs have to be put somewhere. They cannot be priced and sold separately.
No one expects Apple to pay for developing new gear based on what they can now charge for an iPod shuffle, so we must expect to pay more for the newer stuff. If you don't want to be an early adopter, that's up to you. It's not a reason to carp over the price points or the margin of any particular item in their product lines.
When I compare rival products to those of Apple, I have experience already of Apple's design and Apple's support of their gear. And I have a lot of their older and newer gear in hand. For my money they can go right on charging a lot for their newly launched products. The money has panned out for me in ways I hever imagined the first time I paid "too much" for a 512k Macintosh. I love my iPad. I wasn't inventive enough to imagine I'd ever have one when I shelled out the dough for that Mac.
I am proud to be part of the reason Apple has been able to bring to market great desktops, laptops, the Pod, the iPhone, the iPod touch, the iPad, the mini iPad, and the Apple Watch. I end up eating rice and beans a lot behind making my gear choices, but I have a lot of recipes for rice and beans and love them almost as much as my gear!
Wow, where did I suggest it was justified? Obviously I was saying it is PROBABLE. Sheesh.
So two or three years in you're calling an entire category a flop? The first smartphone wasn't sold until arguably 1999, depending on your definition. They were relatively expensive and slow. A few years later came BlackBerry, then iPhone and Android-based phones.
The first high definition TV broadcast occurred in 1996. I'm sure not many people knew anybody with an HDTV in the 1990s. I'm also sure since not everybody had it in two or three years it flopped. I certainly know of not a single person now with an HDTV.
How much were the first HDTVs in the 1990s? How much was the first iPhone? Huge difference there. I think I just found the reason why you did not see many.... The key difference he is that people wanted a HDTV, they could not afford it. People can afford a Smartwatch (very cheap), they do not want it, hence in my opinion a flop.