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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

This is revisionist drivel.

Every year it's always "Apple is dying" as they continue to siphon money from every industry they touch. They are about to push a tonne of users into a higher price point with the iPhone X. The Apple Watch is an unquestionable success. We are on the precipice of seeing an ARM based MacBook based on their incredible work with A-series chips. They are also strategically very well placed with their Health and AR initiatives.

Anyway look forward to your position in a few weeks when iOS 11.1 is released given the betas are looking pretty good.

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Do we even have sales figures for the apple watch. All I see is made up numbers and guesses.

I never noticed anyone anywhere wearing an apple watch.

Not that I spend any time looking at people's wrists, but you'd think if it was a massive success everyone would notice.

Interesting. Where do you live? Here in London they are really commonplace - you see them on people on the tube all the time and I notice them being used fairly regularly by all ages and sexes for contactless payments, running, etc. In fact they seem so widely adopted that it’s not uncommon to see even people with them who you would not necessarily expect to be wearing them.

Plural of anecdote isn't data.

I think they were referring to "I never noticed anyone anywhere wearing an apple watch."

They are given out for free to anyone signed up to Vitality health care (and stay 'active'). A lot of companies in the city use them as the health care perk.

I wonder how much that has bolstered the amount of people using one.

They're pretty rare in my UK city; I expect being able to use them for the Tube provides a useful rationalisation for the purchase - the are a lot more richer people in the greater London area too.

They are very common here in Austin. The woman working at the counter in the Post Office wears one and the last couple of doctors I've visited wear them. How common are they? I'm not sure. The fact that they have a distinctive appearance makes them much easier to identify than other watches since the other watch companies make so many models.

It would be interesting to see the geographic distribution; I was in Delaware a two years ago and used mine to pay for my purchases at a Bookstore and everyone was quite surprised--they were unaware of the active Apple Pay feature on their own point of sales terminals.

I travel to a good number of middle America small towns and consistently see small business / middle manager upper middle class men wearing them. No women, fwiw.

The people wearing them aren't techie types at all which is why I'd guess the sentiment in tech circles is so negative on the watch's success. I think we're used to seeing our colleagues being the earlier adopters of gadgets like these, but the Apple watch early adopters include a diverse set of non-tech people.

> The people wearing them aren't techie types at all

Most of the Apple-using techie types I'm friends with have a Watch.

Although as a counterpoint, at $WORK, most of the techie types don't (but also don't use other Apple stuff.)

I shouldn't have implied adoption is necessarily low in tech circles. What I meant is that I've seen a surprising adoption by non-tech people, making the proportion of the adoption out of the ordinary and harder to jduge using past experience with tech devices.

I think it's one of those things you notice once you're looking for them. I certainly see them fairly regularly, in my smallish MidWestern city.

As a random example, yesterday I bought fast-food fried chicken for lunch. The woman who took my order was wearing an Apple Watch. The barista at my regular coffee shop wears one.

They're definitely showing up on non-tech people. I've also never seen a woman wearing a smartwatch that isn't an Apple Watch.

Apple said they're bigger than Rolex in revenue.

Apple claims that sales are up 50% since last year with an estimate total of 33 million watches sold. Apple is even calling itself the "nr 1 watchmaker in the world", even though technically I believe Swatch Group is still larger if you include all of its brands.

The last wristwatch I wore regularly was a Swatch. That was back around 1994. After that, I either used stationary clocks, the time display on the computer I was using, or a cheapo toy-quality digital timepiece thrown into a pocket of my backpack--the sort of thing you might get in a cereal box or a Happy Meal.

Starting around 2001, that last one got replaced by my mobile phone.

I'm not really seeing the use case for smart watches. But then again, I was never a fan of purses or fanny packs or any kind of jewelry either, and never understood fashion, so I'm probably never going to see the point of smart watches either. If I'm going to strap anything to my body all day, it has to be clearly useful for the entire duration, to overcome the discomfort and inconvenience. I'm just not seeing that yet in any of the available options. In every case, I'd rather put a wrist strap on my phone.

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