Is everyone excited about getting smartwatches this holiday season? No? Well, that’s news to Tiger Beat in the Valley’s Barry Levine.
“Our crystal ball says the top-selling smartwatch this season will be…” (indirect link)
And by “crystal ball” VentureBeat mean “highly dubious survey.” So, pretty accurate. It’s about as predictive as a ball that is made of crystal. Slightly less predictive than a Magic 8-Ball, which at least tries to give you answers.
‘Tis the first big season for smartwatches.
That is a thing you can write on the Internet with absolutely no proof to back it up! See? There it is in black and white! So it must be true because “big” is a relative term so it can mean anything so there we settled that.
The crystal ball was actually First Insight’s online quiz that collected feedback from nearly 1,000 randomly chosen people…
“Nearly 1,000.” It was “actually” 966 which is shorter to type out but four digits and a comma looks better. See? It’s almost five digits with the comma, really, so it’s more like 10,000 people.
…asking them about eight prominent smartwatches.
Wait, you can say one of the currently shipping smartwatch sad sacks is “prominent” without bursting into flames? Huh. The Macalope would never have guessed that.
The winning smartwatch overall? The Asus Zenwatch.
Congratulations to Asus on this utterly meaningless win! It’s a fine looking watch, but First Insight’s top-notch sciamatific survey used images with no scale to show the watches. The Zenwatch is 51 mm long and 39.9 mm wide. The larger of the two Apple Watches is 42 mm long, so it’s about as long as the Zenwatch is wide.
It might make an excellent vambrace. Perhaps that explains its relative popularity, particularly among LARPers.
And if Apple is reading this…
They should stop wasting their time and get back to work.
It’s fine for the Macalope to be reading this, but dumpster-diving is his job. Apple really should have something better to do.
The second most popular? The Apple Watch.
Buh? So, this survey is obviously not of holiday buying intentions despite the headline spin since, you know, you can’t so much buy the Apple Watch this holiday season. Really, it’s just a slide show with ratings. In other words, it’s sad and pathetic like Rate My Body instead of being gross like Tinder.
But the real surprise, [First Insight’s chief marketing officer Jim Shea] said, was…
That you actually paid people to complete this survey?
…that, “for women who voted to buy a smartwatch for themselves, Apple was number one.”
Which is surprising because… uh, no one really knows why this is surprising.
“If I was Apple,” Shea told us, “I’d make a watch specifically for women.”
Are you listening, Apple?
A watch… for women? What sort of rough alchemy would that require? Is such a thing even possible?
Wait, don’t the results actually show that women already like the Apple Watch pretty well? Does Shea even understand his firm’s own findings?
These results say very little about the Apple Watch’s position. When it eventually does ship, it will require an iPhone (at least initially), which limits its broad adoption. It’ll still ship pretty well, probably better than any of the exercise weights currently shipping under the “smartwatch” moniker. Beyond that, slideshow surveys aren’t going to reveal much.