Although no one can decide whether the Apple AAPL +2.07%
Watch will be a huge success or failure at this point, it looks like
Apple wants to give its device the best chance of succeeding in its
stores.
In a report from Re/code,
Apple has stopped selling the Jawbone Up and Nike+ FuelBand. An attempt
to find the two fitness trackers on the West Coast as well as in New
York came up short for the tech news site. And the Mio heart-rate
tracker is now only in Apple’s online store.
I have reached out to Apple and will update this post if I hear back.
At Apple’s “Spring Forward” media event on Monday,
CEO Tim Cook went into some detail around the company’s retail
strategy. The Apple Watch will go up in its stores on April 10 where
customers can preorder one. They’ll be viewable in special glass
cases–similar to a jewelry case. Apple will also start selling the watch
in high-end retail shops like Selfridges in London and Galeries
Lafayette in Paris.
Over the past year, Apple has been slowly ramping down the number of
wearables it offers in its stores. Soon after the Apple Watch was first
announced, Apple took down Fitbit’s activity trackers from its stores.
Jawbone’s clip-on pedometer can still be found in stores, but that’s not going to compete for the limited space on your wrist.
Removing competing wearables from the Apple Store may not mean much
for these wearable companies in terms of unit sales. Mio CEO and founder
Liz Dickinson told Re/code that her company did not sell a large volume through Apple Stores, though it did help with the prestige factor.
Many are expecting the Apple Watch to completely remake the nascent
wearables industry and bring it more into the mainstream. Strategy
Analytics expects Apple to ship 15 million of its watches in 2015,
giving Apple a 55 percent share of smartwatch shipments out of the 28
million smartwatches expected to ship in 2015. Meanwhile, Forrester
Research estimates that Apple will sell 10 million watches this year.
Fitbit has been going more towards the smartwatch side of
wearables with the recently introduced Fitbit Surge, which has a screen
for getting notifications from your phone. The Surge has constant
heart-rate monitoring and an advertised battery life of seven
days–compared with only 18 hours for the Apple Watch. Fitbit, which
currently has the largest market share of fitness trackers, is not
worried about Apple.
“General purpose smartwatches have been struggling to find a good use
case for people. If anyone’s going to figure them out, I’m guessing it
will be Apple,” Fitbit CEO and cofounder James Park told me at this
year’s Consumer Electronics Show in January. “But I still feel like the
price point is pretty high for most consumers. I think being limited to
iOS ecosystem is also going to constrain that. Given those things and
size and form factor of the Apple Watch, there’s clearly an opportunity
for coexistence. It’s not one or the other. People have a lot of
different preferences. It’s good to have a lot of options for the
consumer out there.”
