| > Apple hasn't shipped a successful new product line since Steve Jobs' death I disagree. The Apple Watch is only "unsuccessful" using a yardstick calibrated to the scale of existing Apple product lines -- in its first year it appears to have achieved sales revenue on the same order as Rolex ($4.7Bn, per Forbes). (Apple's secretiveness makes it hard to tell how many Watches they've sold, but the low estimates are in the millions, and the high end estimate -- 12 million shipped through 2015, per Canalys -- would put them in the same league as the market leading luxury watch manufacturer, if not ahead.) If any other company had released a product that replaced the century-old industry-wide #1 luxury brand within a single year it would be seen as truly disruptive and a major breakthrough. But the wristwatch industry is small by Apple standards, and the nascent smartwatch market is still embryonic compared to smartphones, so the scale of sales doesn't match onlookers' inflated expectations of an Apple product. (As for Project Titan, I expect a bit more than just an electric car, given that scale of investment. Possibly an attempt at redefining how we do intraurban and suburban personal transport, the Apple way. But they'll have an uphill struggle to supplant the automobile with something better, because of all the built infrastructure and regulatory constraints, so at least at first it'll look like "just an electric car".) |
What's interesting is that if you think of the Watch in terms of it being a computing platform, 12 million devices shipped might be considered a bad sign.
Sega had two back-to-back systems that shipped in that League (the Saturn shipped 9.26 million and Dreamcast shipped 9.13 million) and both systems are considered massive commercial failures, so bad that they nearly sunk the company forcing Sega to pull entirely out of the hardware market.