Apple announced the Apple Watch in September along with the new iPhones and it is expected to go on sale in early 2015. The Apple Watch will be the company’s first new entry into a major product category since the iPad and will be Tim Cook’s first brand new product since taking over as CEO. With growth hard to come by in other product categories due to market saturation, the success or lack there of for the new gadget will be closely monitored by financial analysts. Many will interpret the success of the launch as if Tim Cook and Apple will be able to continue to succeed in the post-Steve Jobs era. Unsurprisingly, analysts are all over the place when estimating how many of the product will sell in the first year, as wearables is a new market.
As seen in the figure above, analysts’ projections for Apple Watch sales range from 10 to 60 million units in the first year, a rather large range. Fred Wilson, the venture capitalist behind Twitter and Tumblr, wrote last week that he did not believe wearables would live up to the hype in 2015, and that the Apple Watch would not be the home run product that the iPod, iPhone, and iPad were for Apple. While this was just his honest opinion, analysts pointed to it as evidence that the wearable would be a total flop.
It’s worth remembering that each of Apple’s “fab four” products — iPod, Macbook Air, iPhone, iPad — of the current millennium was widely derided. Each of these products was declared a failure at launch for a variety of reasons, from price to features to form factors. Even with moderate sales matching the lowest estimates, the Apple Watch would still add $5 billion to the top line for Apple, which is not huge considering the company earned $182.7 billion in revenue last year, but is still noteworthy. These moderate sales would still obliterate the numbers of everything else in the smartwatch category and make Apple Watch the defining wearable tech product for the moment.
