Smartwatches…R.I.P.?!

Over at Gizmodo.com Alex Cranz offers an article on Smartwatches.  This article anticipates/predicts the death of these products:

Smartwatches are dying because they’re useless

I’ve noted before I absolutely love tech and am always curious about new tech.  I’m intrigued by them and always interested in reading about, if not actually trying/buying new products, provided they are useful.

On the other hand, I’m not quick to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.  I noted several times before how articles were predicting the end of the desktop PC.  My feeling was that while laptops/tablets were wonderful, there would always be, at least for me, a need to have a desktop computer.  I like the big screen (today, you can get multiple really big screens if you want).  I prefer the full ergonomic keyboard versus the ones usually found on laptops.

Further, it was my feeling the whole “desktop computers are dying” article failed to note that desktop PCs by that time had reached a point where they were so damn good (in terms of speed, capacity, and durability) there was no need for people to buy a new desktop PC every year like we used to when the processors were constantly being improved.

Having/using a desktop PC also didn’t mean I didn’t need or want a tablet or laptop computer.  Its just that when I’m writing, which as an author one tends to do, my preference is to do so while sitting behind my trusty ol’ desktop computer.

The smartwatches, though?

Their usefulness remained elusive to me.  I mean, there were certain things that were undeniably cool about them but it just seemed they were nothing more than an even smaller version of your smartphone, but with two very big problems: 1) their battery charge, at least in those early model releases, seemed pathetically small and 2) their actual usefulness depended on being linked to smartphones.

Why, I asked myself, would you get a smartwatch which needs to be charged every day and, if actually used, as often as twice a day?  Then again, why get a smartwatch when you already have a smartphone doing the things the smartwatch is supposed to do?  Its not like carrying a smartphone is a burden.  If you already carry around a smartphone, why get this ancillary bit of tech?

So I didn’t bother looking into smartwatches much more after reading the initial reviews/stories of their capabilities.  Over time it appeared the hysteria for this new tech dropped quite a bit.  Now there are numbers attesting to this, from the article linked to above:

A more recent report from IDC suggests the Apple Watch, the most popular product of its kind, saw a 71.3 percent drop in sales from last year, overall sales dropped 51.6 percent.

Yikes.

Unless I’m terribly mistaken (not beyond the realm of possibility), the Apple Watch was the only “new” tech Apple provided in the last few years.  I mean, they are doing well with their iPhone and iPad and I suppose their laptops are growing in popularity versus before, but other than Apple TV (is that a success?  I genuinely don’t know), the Smartwatch was their Big New Product™ and, based on the numbers listed above, it appears that product is in the process of bombing.

This leads me to a secondary point which I’ve also noted before:  The success of a business, especially a tech based business, is to convince people every so often -say within a year or less- they have either a) a better version of an already popular product which their buyers need to get and thus spend money on while discarding the old in favor of the new or b) the company offers something “new: to buy and, hopefully, this product will prove popular and, over time, slides into the “a” column.

Desktop PCs are a beautiful example of this.  The desktop computer was first sold in the very late 1970’s/early 1980’s (my first desktop computer was the Atari 800).  The desktop computer proved a popular product and soon we had the IBM based machines with their mighty 8088 processors.

These computers were, compared to the computers of today, absolute garbage but at that time were state of the art.  Improvements were rapidly made and for those who lived through the rise of the desktop PC you’ll remember we went through a succession of better and better models.  In almost every case, you quite literally had to consider buying a new model each year as the new ones put the older models to shame.

And then, as I stated above, we reached a point where the desktop PC reached a plateau and suddenly it wasn’t so very necessary to consider buying a new desktop PC to replace your old one.  In my case, I used to buy new desktop PCs every year to two years and suddenly I realized a desktop PC I had worked for me a mind-boggling 5-6 years before I decided to replace it…and that was because I noticed the machine was glitching.

The current computer I have is 2+ years old.  I have neither need nor desire to replace it with a new one and don’t anticipate doing so for years to come.

As successful as Apple is, I suspect they’ve reached a similar point with their tech.  It wasn’t all that very long ago when new versions of their iPhone would come out and it was a freaking event.  I mean, people were lining up around the block and overnight to be the first to get their hands on the new and improved model.  And the new and improved models were indeed new and very much improved over the previous ones.

Now, though, while the iPhone remains very popular, the newer versions don’t grip the public like before.  I don’t see lines forming like they used to at the various tech shops/cell phone companies for their new product.

Same seems to apply to their tablets.  I love my iPad.  At least two new versions of the iPad were released since I bought mine.  While I certainly would love to buy one of those new 12 inch monitor versions, the reality is that I get pretty much everything I want out of my current iPad and don’t need the new one.  Buying a new model is an expensive luxury I can afford not to have.

But at least those products proved successful enough to get people interested in buying, if for a while, each new version.  With the Smartwatch, it appears this bit of tech may be hitting a dead end almost from the start and people may be aware now they simply don’t need them.

It is possible, of course, for future iterations of the Smartwatch to come and prove themselves more useful.  Then again, if we go by the sales figures, things look mighty bleak for the future of the Smartwatch.