The Apple Watch has a “behavioral value” of $351 a year, according to a note from firm Global Equities Research.
That’s basically the price of a 38mm Sport, so tell that to the people who ask you what your new wearable is good for.
The research note, which comes from GER managing director Trip Chowdhry and analyst Tej Singh, who sampled between 200 and 250 Apple Watch owners, InformationWeek reports. Participants reported that their Apple Watch cut down on the number of times they had to remove their iPhones from their pockets by half, from 110 times a day to 55.
Chowdhry and Singh assumed a time of about six seconds for each removal, which translates to a daily savings of five and a half minutes — or 33.46 hours annually. If you were paid $10.50 an hour for that time, your “savings” per year would be about $351.31.
That’s what the report says, anyway. It’s a fun exercise, but unfortunately, time does not equal money. Even if the Apple Watch “pays” for itself, it doesn’t take into account the cost of the iPhone you need to run it and the service plan you need to run the iPhone. Nor does it account for the time you spend looking at and messing with your Watch, which GER’s research note calls “the most addictive device ever created for both consumer as well as for the enterprise.”
Time does, however, equal time, and almost a day and a half of increased efficiency per year is pretty impressive. Even if it does sound a little bit like that old Saturday Night Live sketch about shortening words.
