Company / division: Apple Watch
Wearables grew 16.9% in Q4 2016, Fitbit still first but Xiaomi is gaining – VentureBeat (Mar 2, 2017)
The numbers here look about right, but what a far cry from the forecasts of the wearables market we saw a few years back. I recently wrote a piece on the state of the wearables market, in which I argued there are really three important sub-markets within wearables: the Apple Watch in its own category, dedicated fitness trackers (in which Fitbit dominates in western markets and Xiaomi in China), and Samsung’s various devices, many of which are bundled with smartphone purchases and therefore thrive on a rather different business models from the others. These IDC numbers largely back that up with market share numbers, but also reinforce the point I made in that article about how the market has fallen short of its theoretical potential and largely stopped growing. It can still grow, but the offerings need to get much better and broader in their appeal, and to some extent we also need the technology – especially in components – to catch up with the vision here.
via VentureBeat
Apple Reports December 2016 Quarter Results – Apple (Jan 31, 2017)
This was an important quarter for Apple – it had predicted a return to growth, and it delivered on that promise, though the growth was helped by the extra week in the quarter due to Apple’s quirky reporting calendar. The highlights were iPhone, Mac, and Services growth, with the latter being by far Apple’s most consistent and fastest growing segment. The lowlights were the iPad, Other Products, and Greater China, all of which were down. Both total revenues and iPhone shipments (which are closely tied) have been within a remarkably narrow range the last three years in the December quarter, suggesting at least something about supply constraints and natural limits. The Mac had its best revenue quarter ever, helped hugely by the new MacBook Pros, which are more expensive than the average Mac Apple sells and boosted ASP a lot. Services was mostly driven by the App Store as usual, but music (Apple Music and iTunes combined) grew for the third straight quarter, and iCloud and AppleCare also helped. Apple Watch had a record unit and revenue quarter too, apparently, though we have to guess at the actual numbers. I’d guess it was marginal growth year on year, for around $2.1 billion in revenue and 6 million units. iPad dropped significantly both in unit shipments and revenue (and ASP), though some of that was down to channel depletion, and the large iPad Pro had launched a year ago, boosting that quarter. Overall, a pretty decent quarter for Apple, but no strong growth here yet (especially when you strip out the extra week). Foreign currency isn’t helping either unit sales or reported revenues or profits, and arguably roughly offset that extra week in several regions.
Lots of real-time tweets from me in this thread, and I’ll be updating the Jackdaw Research Quarterly Decks Service deck for Apple in the coming days once the 10-Q is out.
via Apple
Apple opens Siri to third-party developers on Apple Watch – Business Insider (Jan 24, 2017)
Apple opened up Siri access to certain categories of developers last year as part of iOS 10, but Siri on the Apple Watch has remained a first-party-only affair. That will change with iOS 10.3, which is rolling out to developers today and offers developers in a subset of four domains the ability to integrate their Apple Watch apps into Siri on the Watch. Apple’s focus in the last year or so has been about putting Siri on essentially every device it sells – a counter to Amazon Echo and Google Home’s single device approach – and making Siri smarter by allowing it to control more third party functionality, albeit in a much more tightly controlled way than Alexa’s Skills approach or even Google’s recent opening up of the Assistant with Actions on Google. These two fronts – third party integrations and the range of devices supported – will be critical as these various companies compete in the voice assistant space, and this small step is part of that much bigger picture.
via Business Insider
Apple Watch Sales Were Way Up Over The Holidays, Slice Data Shows | Fast Company (Jan 6, 2017)
Slice is one of those data sources you can’t completely trust – because the data is about online purchases only, it’s partial, and it’s also only ever directional. But this data suggests decent growth year over year for the Watch, which is in line with Tim Cook’s fairly vague but positive remarks on sales recently. The Watch should have sold well over the holidays – the second generation launched shortly before with some new hardware features (and better software), the base price is now cheaper, and there were deals on several models over the holiday shopping period. We won’t, of course, get hard numbers from Apple, but there should be enough in the reported results of the Other Products category to check if this is true come the end of the month.
Pokémon Go arrives on the Apple Watch | TechCrunch (Dec 22, 2016)
This Watch app was announced way back in September, so it’s been a long time coming. But it looks really solid and is cleverly integrated into the Activity app too. Stuff like this is what the Watch needs to make a success of its App Store, which so far has been a little underwhelming.
via Pokémon Go arrives on the Apple Watch | TechCrunch