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.

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.

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.

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.