On the eve of the presumed announcement of the fourth generation of Apple Watch, the Macalope thought it would be educational to look back at what people said about Apple’s most prominent entrant into the category that people literally said the company would go out of business if it didn’t compete in.
Okay, he thought it would be funny to look back at what was said. But, then, isn’t laughter the best educator? Oh, wait, it’s the best medicine. Frankly, the horny one thinks that’s penicillin but, still, who doesn’t like to laugh?
Possibly the people we’re going to talk about in this column today.
Back in mid-2014, you couldn’t swing a giant-assed, creepily-featured Samsung Galaxy Gear watch without hitting someone saying Apple needed to ship an “iWatch” now, now, NOWWWWW! So they did. Then guess what happened.
That’s a rhetorical request, by the way. The Macalope doesn’t really need you to guess. First of all, you probably know what happened but, second, you know the Macalope can’t hear you, right?
Anyway, they hated it and declared it a “flop.” Now, we don’t have time to go through all of the pundits who called the Apple Watch a flop because we’d run out of digital ink and, also, the Macalope has a lunch thing with some wyverns. But let’s look at a few.
Writing for Inc., John Brandon called the Apple Watch “a Newton-like failure”.
Since its release on April 24, I’ve (ahem) watched and waited to see how the story unfolds. I didn’t want to make any overly bold predictions, but I felt something in my gut that said this was going to be a fail.
He waited a whole two months to write that. He might have wanted to wait a little longer. Forever would have been good but, you know, at least until it was clear that it was actually a success and not a failure would have been something.
The Newton sold about 100,000 units in its first year. The Apple Watch is estimated to have sold about 15 million in its first year, and a lot more since. This is just math.
(Pundits were also pretty sure that Apple not reporting unit sales for the Watch was a sign it was a flop, too.)
Around the same time, writing for the Forbes contributor network and home for wayward and very, very angry beavers, Gene Marks tried to explain “Why The Apple Watch Debut Is Worse For Apple Than Glass Was For Google.”
Now, the Macalope hears you. He knows he just said he can’t hear you but he just means he knows what you’re thinking and that is “You silly half-man, half-Mac, half-antelope. He did not write that, no one wrote that because that is ludicrous and by the laws of logic that govern our universe you would summarily burst into flames were you to write something so catastrophically dunderheaded.”
Look, the Macalope doesn’t know what to tell you. He wrote it. You can look it up.
Why did he write this? Well, can we really rule out rabies? The Macalope knows for a fact we can’t rule out Lyme disease. But if you’re asking about the argument he made, again, the Macalope must point out that he still can’t hear you. However, just in case that is what you’re wondering about, Marks seemed to think that because he hadn’t seen a lot of people wearing Apple Watches and (this is an actual thing he wrote) his son didn’t understand the point of the Watch, it had to be a bigger failure than Glass.
Seriously, do you want to write for the Forbes contributor network? The Macalope doesn’t know you or anything about you (still can’t hear you!) but he is pretty sure you could if you just asked. On the internet, no one knows if you’re a dog or a cat or a cat that writes for the Forbes contributor network.
It is odd after all that flailing about, hardly any of these pundits talks about the wearables category anymore. This was a dire situation for Apple just four years ago and now… crickets. They’ve presumably moved on to self-driving cars which Apple positively must ship one of in the next 48 hours or KA-BOOM!
As we await the next version, we can reflect on how well the Apple Watch has actually done and how some people are even crediting it with having saved their lives. Despite all the castigation, it turned out pretty well.