So are we supposed to see another glut of people wearing these things after this holiday season? Then maybe followed by another drop-off?
Most other tech companies report sell-in which is units sold to retailers. You can game those numbers by what's called "channel stuffing". You "sell" tons of units to distributors and retailers, many of which will ultimately be returned unsold or cleared out at fire sale prices which you'll be forced to give a rebate on. By then all the tech journalists will have moved on to the next shiny bauble and no one will notice you only sold 20% as many units as you claimed or ate losses on 30% completely wiping out your profit margin.
Sell-through is a percentage of units sold to customers related to units sent to stores so it doesn't say much without the total amount sent
And apple gives sell-though when they can, iPhone sales are reported as sell-in when they are not sold though Apple Stores
The lift in units sold must definitely be affected by the recent price drop.
Anecdotal evidence: we have a fitness app that connects with the Apple Watch, and we have seen a large number of users connect their Apple Watch (about 7% of our total user base). We get data from these watches on a regular basis which means the watches are on and being used.
The battery is still terrible (barely runs a day) compared to Fitbit Blaze (5-7 days).
Everytime I meet someone who uses (used to use) the Watch, it usually turns out they have given up because of short battery life. I have a series 1: looks like it has improved in recent versions. I'm glad to hear that. Mine barely lasts a day.
Battery life is really important. Many of my friends see smartwatches as primarily a fitness device, and when the comparison with Fitbit (or anyone else) happens, it usually comes last.
My hope is that Apple focusses aggressively on making the iWatch battery life longer. That would undoubtedly lead to further lift in sales and happier customers.
* Apple Watch - released last year
* Apple Watch Series 1 - released in September of this year, has new CPU, but otherwise mostly same
* Apple Watch Series 2 - latest edition
Something is defective with the watch or it isn't running watchOS 3 if it isn't lasting a day. I can easily last a weekend.
BTW, both android and apple watches are not very practical in terms of battery life. You had Blaze, I had Basis Peak which could do 10 days. I think Pebble is probably the most reasonable solution, unfortunately they just got acquired, so not really sure what will happen there.
I'm not wearing it at night and I don't overuse it in the day. I also don't consciously NOT use it, to preserve battery life. Note the double negative. (Maybe I got this wrong; what I meant: I don't make the conscious decision to use my watch very lightly in order to preserve its battery life. If I have to use it, I use it. I don't go out of my way to make the battery last.)
I use Siri a lot, I sometimes take my calls on my Watch (when I am at home or alone), I use it to remote control Apple Music on my iPhone, I receive tons of notifications, I use it to check my work calendar and weather an awful lot, I have lots of apps with background refresh enabled (weather, calendar, emails, etc.), I didn't disable the GPS, it's recording my steps and activity at all time.
Very, very satisfied with the battery life. I thought it would be terrible based on Apple Watch (the old one, not the newer, revised Series 1).
* both US coasts, Denver, and two "middle America" states (I saw 4 people in a WalMart in Berryville, AR even, not a place known for affluent tech consumers)
And to steal another line (from Steve Jobs, related to Amazon's vague brags of Kindle Sales) - "Usually, if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody." [2]
It would be nice to know the actual quantities of watches being sold from the horse's mouth as opposed to guesstimates from analysts.
[1] http://www.technologizer.com/2010/08/25/new-kindle-is-here-s...
[2] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/in-qa-steve-jobs-sn...
Depends on where you live. In several big cities I visited last month, I've seen them 10-15 times in various random people and on 2 friends I've met (from an overall of 30+ friends).
They're not like the iPhone of course, that sells 60+ millions per quarter and has done so for 9+ years, we're talking about a watch that sells around 1-2 million here (and that probably globally), so much less chance of seeing one.
It's a normal watch, no LEDs display, but it's filled with trackers and sync with my phone via BLE. I need to recharge it every 8 months. So far it's been great :)
I like to see how much I sleep, or how many steps I did. (I don't know how but it picks up when I go jogging on a treadmill.)
The thing I wish it had was a heart rate tracker. It looks like smartwatch who have that need more frequent recharges though :/