Apple-Watch Is Not After Wearable Market, It’s After How We Tell Time

I had a chat with Greg Maher from Look Northinc and the below thoughts came about.

Apple launched last week its new and long coming iPhone6, as well as the Apple Watch (aka, not iWatch).

Apple Watch is a $350-$1000 or so hardware that can tell time, as well as connect via bluetooth to your iPhone to become smarter. It can show text messages with inteligente predictive replying mechanism, take a call or see who is around you. As Apple says – an entire new kind of conversation.

If you search for news about Apple Watch, there are few interesting threads going on. One of them discusses Apple-Watch going into the Wearables market, dangering Jawbone and Fitbit. There is another thread discussing Apple going after the growing smart watches market. There are many others.

Here is an hypothesis. Apple Watch price is now kind of stuck between the luxury watch line of Omega, Rolex, IWC which is $1k+ to the popular watch lines, the likes of Swatch and Seiko, going for the $100-$200 range usually.

If I had to guess, early adopters of people buying the Apple-Watch will be mainly people that would buy new things Apple launches whether they need it or not. But long term, I don’t really think Apple cares to define itself as a leader in the Wearable Smart Watches; I think they’ll try to redefine the watches industry as a whole, and build an ecosystem around it.

Rolex will always stay Rolex, but over time, in a world where price goes down, becoming more affordable and Apple Watch goes for $150 a pop, if you’re a kid in school, you want to be cool, you may even have an iPhone — and you can get a Swatch or you can get an Apple Watch, same price – which is it?

Swatch’s annual revenue alone is over $8B while Jawbone is valued over $3B, so Apple’s potential is to go after the way most of us get the time, using every day watches. There were times when we actually used CDs to listen to music, and physical buttons to type an email on our mobile phone. These things happened, and Apple changed that.

Today we won’t consider a mobile device just for the purpose of talking, that would be weird.

5 years from now we may forget a watch once just told the time.

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