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Comment by dangoor | Hacker News Reader

Apple is generally not the first out of the gate in a product category, but that hasn't hampered their success. I fully expect an untethered Apple Watch sometime.

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To be sure. I really don't like the style, but I can't deny that they boomed the market for smartwatches. You could by a cell phone watch decades ago, but it wasn't particularly awesome. But now, with the amount of tech that can be crammed in the same space, combined with the fantastic power management and battery densities, we're seeing real functional stuff.

And you bet Apple will have some sort of untethered watch. I bet it's expensive though. Not as a joke, but to make sure it doesn't compete with their flagship. Or maybe not; if Samsung's method works and people bundle the 4G watch with a phone just as much, maybe we just get that much more connected.

Regardless, I think it's pretty premature to be whinging about the market for smartwatches failing like the article.

Apple is not averse to cannibalizing one of the products for another of their products (because it's better for them to do it than for a competitor to do it!). It's hard to imagine a watch form factor replacing many uses of the smartphone, but I could imagine some people who opt for watch + tablet rather than watch + phone. The screen on the watch is just too small for many of the things that people use their phones for.

I didn't interpret the article as saying that the market for smartwatches was failing. My read of it was that smartwatches are consolidating around the Apple Watch, given marketshare numbers and what has happened with the competitors so far.

IMHO, there's a lot of room for growth and there's no reason to assume that Apple will dominate in marketshare (though if recent history is a guide they may dominate in profit).

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