You are exactly right, which is why this is so worrying from an investment perspective.

No matter if you like it or not, the wealthy drive fashion and taste. The reason why we think of BMW, Porsche, Ferrari's as "luxury" is primarily because the rich buy them.

No stock trader is going to trade his Philippe Patek for a $350 watch that his pool-boy wears.

This is something that is not getting talked about. No one buys watches to tell time. They are almost exclusively used as status symbols.

This is the miscalculation in Apple's plan. No one needs a watch anymore. Trying to make one relevant for a purpose other than status symbol is going to be tough.

They should've made a "smart band" that connects to any watch face. That would've been a clever strategy.

I do. I don't go anywhere without my watch (I have two, in fact). I purchased a $300 watch (after numerous Timex watches dying in a year) in high school that I've worn daily for 5+ years; I don't see that changing anytime soon. I hate pulling out my phone just to check the date / time—I always get distracted by something. If I need the time or date quickly, I look at my wrist.

And yet, the stock trader has the same phone that his pool boy does...

I don't see it as that different from the iPhone today. BMW drivers and pool-boys both employ them as status symbols and neither lets the other drag that image down.

The tablet market has been around for well over a decade, it's just that Apple was the first not to build one totally half-ass and as an afterthought or add-on to some more mature market. Tablets before the iPad were basically just weird laptops, and sold about as well as you'd expect something with that description to sell. Same with smartphones, which really replaced both mobile phones and PDAs: the market was there, and entities were making products, but every effort was half-assed and horribly crippled in some way.

I don't know where this product and market is headed. I lump it, for now, into the same category I lump Glass: very interesting tech, but I don't think I have a use case for it. But that's exactly the opposite of where I put tablets before iPad, and PDAs before iPhone, where I knew I had a use case for this stuff, but all the tech was overpriced garbage.

e: and, just to add, this is typical of an inexplicably common failure mode I seem to notice an awful lot, which is:

1. identify a potential market for X, with few or no participants

2. design shitty product B, in attempt to capture that market

3. when shitty product B fails, declare there is no market for X, move on to something else

One of the strengths of Apple, I think, is that they don't do this very often, i.e. they build good products even if they have no apparent competitor. Thus they can build new markets more easily.

Er, no, they didn't. Some people said that. Lots of people said it was stupid but that it would probably sell well nonetheless. Other people said it was a well-conceived product for the market even if it wasn't what the speaker was looking for (which is basically the same as the previous thing, but with less ego.)

Lots of people said it was something they were looking for.

However, they are releasing their product just two years after the first real smartwatch came out(the Pebble), and the same year that the first color screen smartwatches started coming out.

This is not the standard Apple procedure. Will the iteration 1 of the Apple watch be successful? I personally don't think so, and I was among the people that predicted the success of the iPad [1]. But, paraphrasing what I said for the iPad, given that the Apple watch is made by Apple and that it's well made, elegant, functional and relatively cheap, it could end up selling very well and prove me wrong.

[1] http://economiauniversitaria.wordpress.com/2010/02/07/el-ipa...

Apple builds what they believe is a meaningful product, and often this involves assembling many more components than their competitors, so it takes them longer.

You mean the declining year-over-year iPad sales figures? The tablet market is far from proven. Maybe the last year has been a hiccup, or maybe tablets weren't all they were cracked up to be.

For the past three quarters, Apple has sold more than 12 million iPads a quarter, or an annual rate of >48 million units. Is 48 million units a year not proof of a market?

I got an ipad2, and haven't found a need to replace it yet. The battery's pretty solid, and at this rate, that's likely to define when it's time for a new one.

Most the people I see buying new tablets are essentially buying "my first computer" for a kid. Something to shut them up in the car. And that's not a great market for apple's prices.

So I don't think the tablet is a flash in the pan - but I don't think the initial rush was sustainable either. Now that pretty much everyone who wants one, has one, it'll settle down closer to lifecycle turnover.

And to stray a little closer to on-topic, I'm hoping for the same from the watch. That's really what I'm waiting to find out, and I suspect we won't know any time soon. But that $350 is going to feel much heavier if I feel compelled to replace it as often as my phone. (on that note, I did find it interesting that there was absolutely nothing in the way of tech specs announced on the phone. No mention of resolution, just that it's enough. No mention of speed, or storage. The models are defined by materials, not numbers. Hopefully, this is a good sign that this device isn't meant to fit into a race to double the numbers each year.)

Of course, my Mom has bought 2 iPads after I bought my first one - maybe the iPad is really targeted to folks who don't already have iPhones?

The reception to the iPad was overwhelmingly positive (if we really need to go to archived press and reviews, we can do that, but this revisionist nonsense about the iPad's reception needs to stop). And I don't remember anyone doubting that it would sell, just as I have no doubt that Apple will sell tens of millions of this watch regardless of any defects.

What people criticized was the notion that the iPad killed laptops -- that it was the new vehicle of productivity. And the terrible name which, while it stuck, remains terrible.

And those critics were by and large right. I know people can point to the fringe "productivity" use of an iPad, but overwhelming we use it for casual browsing, watching videos, and playing casual games. Exactly the same sort of stuff that we did on PMPs before. Because the iPad is a biggie-sized PMP, and it was hardly the first to idealize the notion that PMPs were cool, but would be cooler bigger (the "CrunchPad", for instance, was proposed two years before the iPad. The concept was obvious, albeit within a narrow band).

Instead, it clearly is excellent for consuming things, and cleverly pinched that giant segment of the market where people had been buying PCs just to browse the Internet, share photos and go shopping. Consumption.