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Sales data from the US is starting to indicate that Apple’s smartwatch might not quite be a hit… yet.
In recent weeks, however, sales have started to dry up, with as few as 6,000 per day by the end of June and still falling.
Do wearables have legs?
Earlier this year we saw Google halt sales entirely of its £1,000 Glass product, and there is anecdotal evidence of more and more Jawbones leaving their users uninspired. Gartner has predicted 1.2bn wearable devices sold by 2020. But with just 70m shipped last year, things need to get moving.
Granted, it is still early days.
Selling a billion watches
It is true that the smartphone revolution has pushed the boundaries of the hardware faster than even Moore’s Law predicted.
It has paved the way for small, extremely inexpensive and power-efficient processors, and these in turn have led to some of the more outlandish predictions of growth in wearables.
Having a tiny processor and WiFi chip are necessary, but not sufficient for the development of a killer wearable. The third piece of the puzzle are the sensors that gather the data to give the wearables their features, and this is where Apple still falls short.
Bernstein, a research firm, provocatively asked what it would take for Apple to sell a billion Apple Watches. They concluded that biometric sensors of the heart, blood pressure, glucose and alcohol had the power to turn Watch from a discretionary consumer item into and ubiquitous health monitoring device.
Dumb fitness trackers… for now
The problem: many of these sensors are years away from commercial availability; some do not yet exist at all.
Without these developments, we are stuck with step-trackers and sleep monitors.
As early as it is to be so bold, the portends suggest the promise of wearables is turning out to be just that.