When we first heard the Apple Watch was coming out, we all had our doubts. Who wants email on their wrist? Why would we send sketches to each other? And of what? (It turns out: dicks.) Would this be like the first release of the iPhone—an unwelcome development in consumer technology before we saw other people with it, and then the hottest item on the market? The preliminary data says: no, it's not like that at all.
Apple has yet to release official sales numbers, but analytics firm Slice Intelligence pulled data from 2.5 million online shoppers, and this is what they found: since the Apple Watch was released in April, sales have fallen by 90 percent.
Apple is currently selling under 20,000 watches per day in the United States—that's down from 200,000 per day during its opening week. At one point in late June, Apple was only selling between 4,000 and 5,000 watches per day. To put that in perspective, 34,000 iPhones were sold per hour over the holidays in November and December 2014. That's high, by any standards—the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus had just come out—but it also casts a terrible light on the smartwatch sales numbers.
Even more damning for Apple, customers don't seem to be shelling out for the really fancy Watches. The 18-karat gold Edition Apple Watch, priced at $10,000, doesn't seem to be very popular—Slice reports that Apple has only sold 2,000 of them in the U.S.
In fact, it looks like most people are opting for the cheaper Sport Apple Watch, which is sold for a reasonable $349.
Apple could still turn things around—they aggressively pushed Watch software updates during their annual WWDC last month—but it looks like an uphill battle from here.
[via Business Insider]
