Apple could be less than one week away from unveiling its long-awaited iWatch, and surprisingly for an industry as competitive as tech, pretty much everyone is rooting on it to succeed.
The reason? Because once Apple cracks open a market and shows how it can be done, everyone else can dive in and make more money.
“If Apple offers its own product, it will expand the market,” Sung-jin Lee, director of LG Electronics’ watch product planning team, told Reuters in an interview.
“This is what we wanted,” Sunny Lee, CEO of Samsung’s European business noted of Apple’s impending wearables debut.
Perhaps the most damning comment in the article comes from mobile analyst Ben Wood of market research firm CCS Insight, who describes what wearables companies have been doing up to this point as “just public prototyping” for Apple’s arrival.
While Samsung currently dominates the smartwatch market, with 74 percent, numbers are tiny compared to the booming smartphone industry. Compared to the 1.3 billion mobile phones expected to sell in 2015, only 1 million smartwatches shipped in Q2, according to market research firm Strategy Analytics.
Some analyst estimates have suggested that, with the help of the “halo effect” of brand loyalty to Apple, the company could sell between 30-60 million iWatches in its first year alone.
Source: Reuters
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
4 responses to “Even Apple’s rivals want the iWatch to succeed”
Of course they want Apple to create an iWatch. They need someone to copy.
you got that right
This is the why of the “Apple can’t innovate anymore” lambasting Apple’s been taking. What’s really being said is “we don’t have a clue what to do with the mobile watch market and we’re desperately hoping Apple will be able to show some R&D that dramatically changes yet another industry, so that we can steal all their ideas like Microsoft did of the GUI computer interface, and what Google did with the iOS interface for the iPhone and iPad, and what Samsung and several hundred other smaller companies are doing with phones and tablets.” I find it exceedingly strange that Apple seems to have such a total lock on creating cool new consumer goods that simply make everyone else’s products look so bad — to the point they need to slavishly copy what Apple does. What I’ve enjoyed is seeing the products other companies have come up with prior to the launch of the iWatch (or whatever it’s called) so that the world can see the lame trash other companies have brought to market prior to Apple’s entry. This way it’s going to be harder for them to claim that they had the same ideas all along, or that what Apple comes up with is “obvious” design.
…because apple of course is in the watch business. LOL.. Just like they’re going bigger screens on phones,etc.etc.etc.etc…