Apple watch sells out

I saw a tweet that suggested that it took Apple 74 days to sell their first one million iPhones, you know, the first version. According to some early projections, they may very well have sold 1 million Apple watches on Friday. There was something interesting about that, expectations were probably for more, signs are that there are production problems with the watch. The company will no doubt put on a brave face through these "challenges". Some are cheering the fact that Apple are failing to meet the demand, they were just being cautious is my best guess. The Apple products are awesome, it is hard to wrap your head around the fact that the iPod is only 14 years old, and that is in October this year. iTunes is 11 years old. The iPhone turns only 8 this year in late June. The iPad is only 5 years old. The watch is a few days old, in fact you could argue that many people will take time to adopt the technology.

From the time that the first major global consumer product in the form of the iPod was released, Apple clocked just over five billion Dollars worth of annual sales. That number is close to 183 billion now, it is very difficult to try and wrap your head around a 10-fold increase in sales in less than ten years, for a small company that is "ok", for the largest company by market capitalisation that is difficult to get used to. That aside, we were discussing the people who would be early adopters of the watch and more importantly, the longevity of the watch.

If the watch is well received, well accepted as being an integral part of the Apple ecosystem, then I have no doubt that it will sell well. What is more important is the ability to be an early warning system for healthcare, that is why I was not surprised when I saw these types of articles, this one from the FT: IBM strikes digital health deal with Apple, Medtronic and J&J.

Health and wellness are becoming huge investment trends and themes, the whole idea of early detection, prevention coupled with healthy eating. Add into this the ability to be able to Help Transform Medical Research, in the words of the IBM release. There will be an amazing amount of data, scientists and medical professionals will like never before have more data to use than they would have ever dreamed of.

Apple is slowly with all the pharma companies, the technology companies, and with the sharing of information, going to help modern medicine like never before. Lastly, as strange as it may sound from an aesthetic point of view, I see people wearing a timepiece and a tool, being their Vacheron Constantin (timepiece) and their Apple Watch (the tool). Not everyone agrees with me, wearing two watches might look very weird at first, so was wearing headphones all the time and that has become mainstream.