Apple Watch smashes watch industry

March 11, 2015

Apple Watch smashes watch industry

Apple has already shaken up some industries in recent years. After the music, film and mobile industry, now the luxury business is a target of Apple’s agenda. Whether this concept works or not, it has yet to be proved.

A wrist watch is the price of a small car and a dainty notebook, which is also available in gold look – now Apple has scattered also Luxury Fashion providers on Monday.

The version the Apple Watch with a case of 18-carat gold called “Edition”, and it will cost at least EUR 11,000 or $10,000. This price is much higher than all competitors’ prices. When we would call this market league with the rival of Apple Watch, they are not also Samsung, LG and Huawei, but Hublot, Rolex or Tag Heuer. Against some of them, the price of the “Edition” acts still relatively low. Apple uses in the watch market as a whole – and especially before dashing to the infirmary of Swiss watchmaking.

At first glance, it is a departure from a democratizing cornerstone of Apple’s philosophy: Whether student, king or billionaire – more than the top model of an iPhone could not buy all the money in the world. With the watch as a fashion statement you can pay with Apple thousands of euros or dollars more for the same technology for the first time, because it is just in a different shell. So the logic is reversed: No matter how much you paid – technically one and the same computer watch’s inside.

Technically the current 453 Apple stores are now also watch stores. Instead of gigabytes of memory, the pixel number in a display or the watch frequency of a chip will go to this display by material selection, colors of leather wristband or the shape of the closures. The former Burberry chief Angela Ahrendts to lead Apple to be responsible for the Group’s stores on this strange box.

Some observers believe that Apple will give the business a boost with computer watches. For the full year 2914 of 4.6 million smartwatches were sold to figures from market researcher Strategy Analytics. Now, there is Gene Munster, an analyst at financial firm Piper Jaffray, cautious with its forecast of eight million Apple watches this year. His colleagues rather tap on 14-15 million.

There is a key question remained at the Golden Apple Watch on Monday. Swiss watches can cost many thousands of Euros – but there are often long-term precision for tools that can be passed with good care from generation to generation. A SmartWatch, however, will be obsolete in sight after only a few years. Will it may be an upgrade option for the money? Or directed the “Edition” to an audience that has so much money that it does not matter?

However Apple also tried this idea to set a counter point to the new image of the luxury group. Thus, the company released the software “ResearchKit”. So Apple will support scientists in their medical studies, if they want to fight diseases such as diabetes, breast cancer or Parkinson’s disease. The software is different from other Apple applications published as open source, which the Group on social networks brought many positive comments.

Foto: Kay Nietfeld/dpa

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