Apple can't afford to drop it yet. It will be refined for another iteration or two. It may or may not be dropped quietly a few years from now - possibly with Tim Cook.
Watch has been a huge and very expensive misstep. IMO Apple should have tried to own the home automation market, with secure, high-margin, high-quality products linked into the Apple ecosystem and built with some measure of AI and smart collective decision making - the kind of thing Nest tried to do, but never quite got right, and which the other players in that market (Belkin, etc) don't have the smarts to try.
Watch is a mistake because it's not useful in the way that classic Apple products are. It can do some mildly interesting things, but the whole point of an Apple product is that you're supposed to dream about owning it because you can do more with it than without it.
Watch doesn't do that. It's a fashion accessory, not a powerful tool that happens to be beautifully designed. So even if it's refined physically - thinner, etc - it's never going to be a huge success unless someone in Cupertino works out how to change that.
How was the Watch a "huge and very expensive misstep"? The analyst estimates I've seen point to them having sold over ten million units at > $250 each. That would make it a multi billion dollar business.
Perhaps opportunity cost. Apple has limited design and engineering resources (seemly at least partially by intent) so they've had to sacrifice in other areas to develop the watch, and so far only seen modest returns.
Modest returns by whose estimates, IDC? And under their functional structure, theoretically Apple is able to shift resources to projects and collaborate better where they need to. If they needed to shift resources from other teams to launch a multibillion dollar Smartwatch business, that's great, you won't hear shareholders complaining. Keep in mind in the last 9 years Apple has launched/revived 3 multibillion dollar hardware industries - Smartphones, Smartwatches & Tablets. Google meanwhile, is struggling to launch a billion dollar business with $1B+ revenue potential like they have in their cashcow in search advertising. Heck how long have they been at it with their "other bets" now and its still a big money loser?
Modest compared to $160B in iPhone revenue. I'm not sure I agree with parent, but on the other hand as a Mac user, the quality of the last couple OS releases does lead me to believe they are stretched a bit thin.
The top of the article your commenting on puts the number at 18M. The vast majority of those would've been sold at $350+, so even being highly conservative, $300*18M = $5.4 billion in 18 months.
Watch has been a huge and very expensive misstep. IMO Apple should have tried to own the home automation market, with secure, high-margin, high-quality products linked into the Apple ecosystem and built with some measure of AI and smart collective decision making - the kind of thing Nest tried to do, but never quite got right, and which the other players in that market (Belkin, etc) don't have the smarts to try.
Watch is a mistake because it's not useful in the way that classic Apple products are. It can do some mildly interesting things, but the whole point of an Apple product is that you're supposed to dream about owning it because you can do more with it than without it.
Watch doesn't do that. It's a fashion accessory, not a powerful tool that happens to be beautifully designed. So even if it's refined physically - thinner, etc - it's never going to be a huge success unless someone in Cupertino works out how to change that.