The Apple Watch may turn out highly successful, exceeding the sales of the original iPhone in its first year on the market.
Apple's first smartwatch has just recently hit the market, despite being announced last year, and many are still skeptical as to whether it will manage to make as big of an impact as the company likely hopes for.
The Apple Watch is nonetheless expected to raise plenty of interest, especially since skepticism has never stopped Apple before. When the company launched its very first iPhone, for instance, many were skeptical about its ability make high-quality phones. Fast forward to present date and iPhones are among the most popular smartphones on the market, with an army of loyal customers who are not easily scared off by hefty prices.
Apple may achieve the same success, if not bigger, with its new Watch, which is expected to be one of the hottest gadgets of this year. While the Apple Watch already has plenty of rivals on the wearable market and it sports a higher price tags compared to other smartwatches, it could prove more successful than the first iPhone on its first year.
The prediction comes from Forbes, which reports that the Apple Watch could outpace the sales Apple saw for its original iPhone in the handset's first year on the market. A chart from Statista estimates that Apple sold roughly 5.4 million iPhones in the first year. Unofficial figures for the Apple Watch, meanwhile, indicate that pre-orders for the gadget are close to 2.3 million already. That's half of the iPhone's first-year sales, and it's just the beginning.
"Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster predicts Apple will have sold 2.3 million units for the June quarter itself, but he also expects demand to ramp up over the rest of 2015, particularly into the holiday season," Forbes points out.
"It took two and a half months from when the iPhone first went on sale on June 29, for Apple to sell 1 million units. Apple didn't announce contracts with mobile carriers in the UK, Germany and France till a full quarter after launch, and it wasn't till the first quarter of 2012, after the iPhone 4S arrived in China, that sales of Apple's most important product really started ramping up," the publication further explains.
It remains to be seen whether the Apple Watch will indeed exceed the first-year sales of the original iPhone, but for now it seems to be off to a strong start. Apple has yet to release official numbers of the Apple Watch sales, but we'll keep you posted as soon as it does.
