Apple reported its quarterly financial results this week, breaking out more detail that almost all of its competitors, but it failed to report specific Apple Watch unit sales and that makes pundits so mad.
Writing for Bloomberg, repeat offender Leonid Bershidsky knows Why Apple Is Afraid to Reveal Watch Numbers (tip o’ the antlers to John Parkinson).
Apple has grown afraid of its own long shadow.
You can just say things! You can just assume motivations! Why not? You don’t need any proof! Just say it!
Here, let’s try it out.
Apple won’t dump the iPod because it’s overly sentimental for the mid-2000s. You can’t prove that’s wrong, because people can’t peer into other peoples’ souls.
Apple won’t make a cheap iPhone because it’s elitist. That one’s just common sense.
Apple hasn’t updated the Apple TV in forever because it thinks it’s funny to lower prices on the current model and watch owners of previous generations squirm.
(That one’s actually true.)
Making up motivations for Apple is easy, free and is what makes the world of Apple coverage go ‘round. So make up a motivation for Apple today, won’t you?
Chief Executive Tim Cook has an explanation for why the company failed to report the sales of the Apple Watch…
But clever pundits like Bershidsky who keep a LinkedIn window open all day for the keen insights on brand engagement know the real reason.
“That was not a matter of not being transparent, it was a matter of not giving our competition insight that’s a product that we’ve worked really hard on.”
Apple is about the only company that currently breaks out unit sales of its flagship products on its financials every quarter. Samsung throws numbers out when it suits them but Amazon isn’t even aware of the fact that you can put numbers on chart axes to provide context for those scale-less lines they trot out every quarter that sure to go up, don’t they?
This excuse is transparently weak.
It is the bespectacled nerd at the Muscle Beach of excuses! Apple is almost begging us to kick sand in its face.
Jobs’s Apple reported the sales of the first iPhone…
And, thus, Apple should break out unit sales of all products in perpetuity. Uh, no. Apple has never broken out Apple TV sales in its financials, for example, although it has given occasional glimpses into them. The fact that they have done it with other products does not mean they need to or should do it with all products.
Apple was a newcomer to the mobile handset market, and could have used the same stealth tactic, hiding iPhone sales in the “other” category.
Yeah, but the iPhone was expected to be “the next big thing.” Go back and watch the Macworld Expo keynote where Steve Jobs introduced it. He specifically said the company hoped to take 10 percent of the smartphone market, which was orders of magnitude ( Pop, pop!) larger even at the time than the smartwatch market is now.
The Macalope isn’t sure what gene pundits are missing that makes them continue to insist the Watch was supposed to be as big a deal as the iPhone when there’s no way it could ever have been, but he hopes that science comes up with some kind of gene therapy for it soon.
Cook claims that “the Apple Watch sell-through was higher than the comparable launch periods of the original iPhone or the original iPad.”
“Cook claims.” Yes, we should definitely not avoid the very real possibility that Cook is simply lying. Are his pants on fire? Why won’t Apple show us his pants?
The first iPhone is not that hard to beat…
The assertion about the iPad is harder to believe.
Wait, he actually is calling Cook a liar. Holy crunchy alfalfa.
…Apple would have had to sell more than 2.18 million watches to beat the first iPad.
Which no serious analyst doesn’t think they did. Heck, they probably sold that many on the first weekend. Strategy Analytics thinks Apple sold 4 million Watches in the quarter. But Bershidsky’s back-of-the-envelope calculation based on numbers Tim Cook said you can’t use to perform this calculation (next he’s going to tell pundits they shouldn’t run with scissors) says they couldn’t have sold more than 2.75 million. So, who are you going to believe? Tim Cook’s lying mouth or this number Bershidsky pulled out of a place numbers shouldn’t be coming out of?
Apple won’t release its unit sales number because it’s afraid of falling short [of analysts’ estimates].
Like they care what analysts think. The Watch is a nice device that makes their entire product line more appealing, but is not a core revenue-generator. Everything they’ve done and said has pointed to that but pundits like Bershidsky keep sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling, “LA-LA-LA-LA I CAN NOT HEAR YOU!”
He may also know that the Apple Watch cannot be a credible replacement for any of the company’s headline products, as the iPhone replaced the iPod.
Yeah, it’s Tim Cook’s secret shame that the Apple Watch business won’t replace the iPhone business when the Watch requires an iPhone to work.
Since Jobs died, Apple has yet to come out with a life-changing new product.
Last year the bar was “new product category”. This year it’s “life-changing new product”. Next year it’ll be “must contain ground-up dragon scale and unicorn blood.”