Apple Watch Looks Set To Outpace The iPhone In Year-One Sales

Apple CEO Tim Cook with the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch, which is shipping in April. (Photo: AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

It’s easy to be skeptical about Apple’s prospects for its first smart watch, an expensive trinket whose necessity is still unclear even after relatively positive reviews. We all know that if you leave your smartphone (or iPhone) at home and get three minutes into a journey, you’ll probably turn around to go back and get it. That’s the so-called “turnaround test” that can point to the success or otherwise of a new gadget.

The Apple Watch doesn’t have a SIM card. It’s more of a helper to the core communications hub that is your phone. Leave it on the kitchen table at home and you might not make that same U-turn.

To me, that has always suggested the Apple Watch would be a slow burn when its came to early sales, even as Apple uses its top notch marketing efforts to convince mainstream consumers they actually do need one just as much as they do an iPhone.

Yet here’s a little historical perspective that suggests the Apple Watch won’t take nearly as long as the iPhone did to catch on: it appears to be well on track to outpace the iPhone in year-one sales.

Apple sold 5.4 million iPhones in their first year, according to this handy chart from Statista.

The company hasn’t released official sales figures for its watch, which went on sale on April 24 in a variety of styles starting at $349. It didn’t even release an opening weekend sales figures, has it did for the iPhone 3G in 2008 and for the first weekend of App Store downloads.

But pre-orders alone of the watch were already estimated to have hit 2.3 million units a week before launch. That’s close to half of all sales of the iPhone in its first year.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster predicts Apple will have sold 2.3 million units for the June quarter itself, but he also expects demand to ramp up over the rest of 2015, particularly into the holiday season.

It took two and a half months from when the iPhone first went on sale on June 29, for Apple to sell 1 million units. Apple didn’t announce contracts with mobile carriers in the UK, Germany and France till a full quarter after launch, and it wasn’t till the first quarter of 2012, after the iPhone 4S arrived in China, that sales of Apple’s most important product really started ramping up.

The long-term success of the Apple Watch is still very much an open question. Will its sales ramp up in the same way the iPhone did?

Apple also doesn’t benefit from the extra subsidies and marketing that carriers bring to the table, and with the Watch still reliant on the iPhone to work as an accessory, it’s unclear if and when it will pass that turnaround test.

But right now, it’s selling more quickly than the iPhone did when it first came to market. And while Apple may have a much stronger foothold in the market than it did eight years ago, that’s still an impressive feat.