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So in total Apple has sold over 25 million watches. Pretty impressive. Cracks me up how some people call it a flop.

For what Fitbit does, lumping it in w/ "others" is not giving Fitbit its due for health monitoring.

I was looking for this typical macrumors reader comment.
Was not disappointed.
So you're looking for alternative facts?
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Units shipped? Are there no stats from any of the companies on "units sold"?

Ahh. You hit on a point some Apple fans use against products like Microsoft Surface tablet or a Samsung Galaxy ("yeah, sure Galaxy had kickass #s in 2016, but that's items shipped. How much is sitting in retail back or storage or gathering dust on shelfs?").

Fair play.
 
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Explain to us from on high Mr. Analyst.
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Leave her out of this.

Err, every store had them on sale over christmas (you cold even get one foe 50 dollars if you bought an iphone)... There is no profit number tied to the revenue number in the article. Not much to explain here.
 
Is this someone opinion? Why is it deliberate?

I assume you are asking this question in seriousness, so I thought I would answer. I am not an Apple employee "in the know" and Apple is not one of my company's (direct) competitors, so these are educated guesses. But I think they are good guesses.

One reason falls under the category of competitiveness. If your competitors, known and unknown, do not truly understand how fast you are turning around specific products at specific prices, it can make it really hard for them to compete by undercutting you. A second reason is vendor/supplier channel . . . management. :) If no one on the outside knows exactly how many widgets you will need, then you can better play vendors/suppliers against each other. A third reason is what some might call accounting and/or marketing games. If you do not report a lot of specifics, especially if you are still making a lot of money for your investors, they will let you get away with some vague reporting in some ways . .. and when the product mix has to change later, you do not get lots of annoying questions about the success of this or of that. You can just say as a whole this chunk of product category is doing great and deal with under-performing lines exclusively internally.

A fourth reason is just my judgment watching this company over time. They are just so secretive about locks of things--some for reasons I have just written--that I think it is second nature to them.

I hold a pretty senior position at a public company, and reasons 1, 2, and 3 are business legitimate reasons we consider all the time. In fact, I help craft a fair part of our strategies and they can center on such reasons. And this is coming from someone with a lot of science/engineering in their background, so you would definitely be correct in guessing I prefer having data. Lots of it. But I realized long ago that I am not the audience for lots of stuff, and that you can definitely get to where you have to write off a whole product cycle if you not at least consider and address such things. Maybe if your widgets are always the best for everyone at a price everyone loves and still make you crazy amounts of money . . . maybe then you could be fully transparent. Probably not, though. And I have never worked for such a company, certainly.
 
Too thick for me and those bezels are horrible.

The one device that Apple needs to focus to make thinner with better battery life, instead of focusing on making the MBPro 2016 thinner with poor battery life. Apple needs to take a step back and collect itself before proceeding ahead, not sure where the lack of focus is from within Apple.

I also want this to work with Android, remember when the original iPod only worked with MacOS. Then Apple allowed windows support and that rocketed the iPod to heights never before seen. I feel Apple needs to do the same with the AW.
 
Err, every store had them on sale over christmas (you cold even get one foe 50 dollars if you bought an iphone)... There is no profit number tied to the revenue number in the article. Not much to explain here.

Sounds inaccurate. Can anyone shoot down this person's claim?
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The one device that Apple needs to focus to make thinner with better battery life.

Physics 101
 
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Units shipped? Are there no stats from any of the companies on "units sold"?

Since shipped = sold, the maker and its investors are happy with that much info. Doesn't usually matter if a sale is directly to an end user, or just to a retailer.

If you mean only sales to end users, most companies which wholesale devices (like Apple) do not report those. They might give some hints by quoting roughly how much unsold store inventory is out there, but that number is constantly growing anyway by millions each year as new markets and stores join in:
channel_inventory_rise-png.570130


Extrapolating from the chart, there's likely over 20 million iPhones sitting in store inventories now. And every one of those was already publicly reported as a sale by Apple. It was just to a retailer though, not to an end user.
 
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Upgraded to the Series 2 from the original and love it! Battery life is phenomenal and believe it or not, I actually enjoy using it as a watch. I always find myself checking my wrist even when it's not on. Looking forward to see where these go in the future!

I upgraded from the series one too, and the battery life is so much better, I can use it 2 days I a row, while also tracking my sleep
 
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Physics 101

Nonsense Apple claims their products are made of magic ;)
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Microsoft sold 200 million copies of Vista and it was a flop.

Not sure what is worse AW with hardware and software selling 25M and considered a flop or Windows Vista being software in many flavours selling 200M and considered a flop :p:D
 
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So in total Apple has sold over 25 million watches. Pretty impressive. Cracks me up how some people call it a flop.

I blame a lot of that on the clueless media. They'll talk up products like the Echo like it's the hottest thing on the planet because by some estimates, Amazon sold a "whopping" 10 million units.

Apple puts similar functionality with far more capabilities on your wrist, and sells far more units at an ASP of over 3x the Echo, yet the media paints Apple as having lost its innovative edge and Apple Watch as a failure because it failed to move Apple's massive financial needle.

In their haste to creative negative headlines that will garner more clicks, they failed to recognize that Apple, in 1 year, created a business large enough to be a Fortune 500 company with Apple Watch.
 
Strategy Analytics will not disclose its exact methodology for competitive reasons, but executive director Neil Mawston told us the company uses "a blend of channel checks, financial analysis, and other sources" to estimate Apple Watch shipments. "It is the same methodology we have used for phones since the 1990s and for wearables since the modern market first emerged circa 2013."

So basically they pull the numbers out of their rear end and more than likely don't include sales from Apple online and retail stores.
 
Go for market share, not outlandish profits, and you get more and happier customers, and more money in the long run.

Yeah that worked wonders for Android OEMs.

Keep the margins healthy and improve the ptoduct to make it a must-have is the right way.
 
I thought the Apple Watch was on the right track last Holiday Season. Especially the S1 in terms of price and indeed nearly bought my wife one. She bought a fit bit zip last week and contemplated getting one of the more expensive models but turned round to me and stated "Might as well buy an Apple Watch which looks better and does more. Maybe as a Christmas present." When the S2 equals S1 prices I will probably buy.
 
There's no such thing as a wearables market, it's an Apple Watch domination in the making, iPod-style.
 
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I tried out the Apple watch and in the end it wasn't for me. I'm sure I'm not alone and there are probably quite a few who have done the same. Smart watches are something you either love or could do with out and come with somewhat of a gimmicky charm to them. The little tricks and things you can do are fun and draw some people in, but over time they grow old leaving just the users that truly want/need a smart watch. I think that combined with people not wanting to upgrade their watch yearly is part of the reason for lower sales overall in 2016. Plus there wasn't nearly as much coverage of the device as there was in 2015. Either way I think it can officially be called a successful product despite so many saying it would flop.
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There's no such thing as a wearables market, it's an Apple Watch domination in the making, iPod-style.

This isn't true at all. Possibly in the smart watch specific area that is true, but there are still a lot of people I see that use a basic FitBit and some I know that never plan to switch to something like the Apple watch because they don't need or want the added features.
 
I tried out the Apple watch and in the end it wasn't for me. I'm sure I'm not alone and there are probably quite a few who have done the same. Smart watches are something you either love or could do with out and come with somewhat of a gimmicky charm to them. The little tricks and things you can do are fun and draw some people in, but over time they grow old leaving just the users that truly want/need a smart watch. I think that combined with people not wanting to upgrade their watch yearly is part of the reason for lower sales overall in 2016. Plus there wasn't nearly as much coverage of the device as there was in 2015. Either way I think it can officially be called a successful product despite so many saying it would flop.
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This isn't true at all. Possibly in the smart watch specific area that is true, but there are still a lot of people I see that use a basic FitBit and some I know that never plan to switch to something like the Apple watch because they don't need or want the added features.

Oh, the game has just started.

Fitbit is already in an alarming corporate situation, Pebble sold for scraps, Android wear is a complete flop, and Samsung has its own OS, leading to more balkanization of the space, thus creating the ideal conditions for Apple's domination.
 
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