Apple is still being coy about Apple Watch sales figures, with Cook this week noting that, “We are not announcing the numbers” — but assuring people that the company has “shipped a lot” of Apple Watches, and that numbers continue to grow.
“This is competitive information,” he said. “I don’t want to help the competition. We shipped a lot [of Apple Watches] the first quarter, then last quarter we shipped even more. I can predict this quarter we will ship even more.”
But how many is a lot?
In his latest commentary, Fortune writer Philip Elmer-DeWitt shared the below chart; collecting not only a wide spread of amateur and professional predictions so far, but also averaging them out.
The blue lines refer to professional analysts, while amateurs are shown in green. As Elmer-DeWitt notes, the 2.5 million — 6 million spread is, “as wide as I’ve ever seen for an Apple product.” The numbers average out at 3.95 million for the last quarter.
Photo: Philip Elmer-DeWitt
That figure would be enough to put the Apple Watch over both the iPhone and iPad in their first quarters. In the first quarter the iPhone was available, Apple sold just 0.27 million units. The iPad fared much better, with 3.27 million units in its first quarter — which places it much closer to the project Apple Watch numbers.
Anecdotally I’ve not seen nearly so many Apple Watches as I saw iPhones or iPads during their first year (I live in the U.K.), although there have been plenty of retailers describing the high demand they’ve seen so far — so I’m happy to be proven wrong.
Still, given that Apple has now opened up about Apple Music sales figures, it does seem kind of odd that they’ve given no indication whatsoever of how the Apple Watch is doing. Maybe next week’s earnings call will shed some light…
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.
5 responses to “Place your bets! Analysts take stabs at secret Apple Watch sales figures”
I have seen only about 2 since launch on peoples wrists on my daily commute to London.
Could be they are not as visible or prominent being on a wrist compare to a phone would be held in the hand,
On a side note. I have not seen any new macbook airs as yet in the wild.
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Just from reading the articles here, it seems the apple watch is only good for tracking heart rates and maybe as an alarm clock of some sort. I just don’t see a huge use for it. Each his own, I guess.
I’ve only seen one Apple watch on a person’s wrist since launch, but I’m not walking around staring at people’s watches either. :)
Why is this even important? It’s already been stressed how AppleWatch doesn’t have much impact on Apple’s revenue. Why don’t these people guess at how many Kindles Amazon has sold? Do these people really think it’s professional to simply take guesses. That spread is way too wide. They might as well be hiring a chimp to pull random numbers out of a hat. It’s unlikely Apple is selling very many of these smartwatches. It surely is one of the least needed consumer products Apple has ever sold.