Good article.
1,875 Apple Watch Editions!
When did Apple last sell so few of a product? I think this may be a record. Did the Newton ever have such low numbers?
1,875 * $13,700 = $25,687,500
When did Apple sell so few of a product
and made such a high level of income proportionate to the sale?
Jonny Ive has said that he is "very tired."
Yeah,
I've read the New Yorker article too. It's clear though that Ive isn't "very tired" of designing products. He's very tired of the extremes people people place on those products and how there's such an extreme fuss and attention paid to it. He's a shy person.
The reason for this is because he tried his hardest to design a thin, attractive watch and failed. The trauma of a thick watch is just too much to bear. He knows his heart is not in wearables. Neither is the general public's.
The attempts to see failure where failure doesn't exist are kinda laughable here. Apple Watch Edition is not intended to be a high-volume product, but a prestige product, meant more to drum up conversation than to actually drive profit. Apple's probably surprised they sold as may as they did.
Admittedly, a lot of this is Apple's own doing. Originally, Apple's position on products like the iPhone was that even if they breached high single-digit percentage numbers in the market, it would be a resounding success for them. We are now unfortunately in the age of "best quarters ever" where cynics assume immediately that if hundreds of millions of a product are not flying out of the factories and into the hands of frenzied fanatical fans, then it's an utter flop.
Such a model isn't sustainable. There are only 7.3 billion people on the planet. And eventually, people are going to point to the fact that Apple didn't sell 8 billion of X product this last quarter, and that means DOOOOOMED.
