| The iPod Nano was a product whose entire purpose was playing music. "The Runwell" is a $600 Shinola watch which only tells the time. The "nascent payment system" which is Apple Pay is better supported by the credit card companies than Google Wallet. It only remains to be seen how many retailers will switch to NFC. Just about everyone who does EFTPOS in Australia uses NFC now, I don't understand why the USA is such a (payment) technology backwater. For the market of people who listen to their music on $500 headphones while walking around or catching the bus to work, the Apple Watch is obviously not going to replace their iPhone or iPod Touch/Nano/Shuffle/whatever. For the market of people who currently use bluetooth headphones while running, jogging, cycling, etc, switching to the Apple Watch (or other bluetooth enabled small form factor personal music player) might be worth the money. Another point to consider is that with the iPhone moving into the "digital surfboard" screen sizes, having a "wrist buddy" makes more sense. Do I want to be hauling my digital surfboard out just to check the time? Am I prepared to spend $500 on a watch ever? What about a watch that combines with my iPhone to do much more than a simple chronograph? All that taken into account, I don't think the market for the Apple Watch is digital gadget geeks. I suspect the actual market for the Apple Watch is people invested in the Apple ecosystem (as opposed to say the Samsung Galaxy ecosystem), who already spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on fashion accessories such as gold watches. The primary use of fancy chronographs is to look good on your wrist. As an incidental function they tell the time, phase of the moon, current date, provide stopwatch and timer functions, etc. Smart watches will even tell you the current weather (as opposed to simply having a thermometer and barometer gauge on the face of the watch). IMHO the primary purpose of the Apple Watch isn't to be an extension to your iPhone, it's to be a fashion accessory which happens to be functional. Just because it doesn't make sense to you at any price doesn't mean it won't make sense to someone who already has two $5,000 watches. |
Put differently, Wallet supports 100% of credit and check cards in the US, whereas Apple supports "many".
Pay, because of the need to generate purchase tokens and "one-time-use" cards, requires integration effort on the side of both Apple and the issuing bank. Pay is not a payment processor, just a gateway.