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Jean-Louis Gassee's Excellent Point About Apple

This article is more than 10 years old.

Jean-Louis Gassee makes an excellent point about Apple and the size of its business here. It comes in two parts both of which I agree with (and have already noted) which is why it's such an excellent point of course.

He's been looking at the wearable computing market through the obvious expedient of going and buying one of the models currently on the market and trying to work out how interesting and or essential it is to him. Not greatly being the answer there: but that of course is not the whole of the point. For we don't know what Apple would, could or might do when it comes to their own take on such computing, the thing we're all calling the iWatch at present. Perhaps they will be able to add more features or functionality that will make it a must have and must use alternative for some people. But that still doesn't mean enough for there's the other part of the point still to answer, what's the size of the market?

For a product to start a new worthy species for a company as large as Apple, the currency unit to consider is $10B. Below that level, it’s either an accessory or exists as a member of the ecosystem’s supporting cast. The Airport devices are neat accessories; the more visible Apple TV supports the big money makers — Macs, iPads and iPhones — by enhancing their everyday use.

With this in mind, will “wearables” move the needle, will they cross the $10B revenue line in their second or third year, or does their nature direct them to the supporting cast or accessory bins?

I'm, as I've said before, with Gassee on this. I cannot see how the iWatch is going to bring us anything particularly new. It's obviously not going to be a fully fledged phone (it is possible to make them small enough but not really as smartphones as yet) and there's not a great deal that an accessory that must be paired with an iPhone is going to bring us. No great functionality that a watch alone can offer us if it's going to be reliant upon the close proximity of a phone to work at all. And in that therefore there's no vast market to make the product into a $10 billion behemoth which is what is required to move the dial at a company the size of Apple's. It might be an interesting addition to the line up, might provide and incremental addition to the ecosystem and the user experience, but it's most unlikely to become a major product line in its own right.

Unless we're both wrong of course and someone does come up with the must have app that an iWatch or wearable computing can provide. But what's that going to be?