Likewise, smart watches used to cost in the neighborhood of $100 until Apple Watch came on the scene and now everyone thinks it’s normal to pay $300 for a smart watch. It was ridiculously overpriced when it started, and it’s still ridiculous now
I wouldn't trade any of my Pebbles for a Apple Watch.
Edit: what I mean is that I consider the Pebble far superior to the AW: customizable and easier to program, with a longer lasting battery and display always on.
Sure, but this argument can be easily taken to its logical absurdity. Someone who just needs a watch that shows the time & date and has a stopwatch can get a Casio which accurately does all this and has a battery that lasts years, in addition to an always-on display (note: for what it's worth, the Apple Watch also has an always-on display). From that perspective a Casio is vastly superior to both a Pebble and an Apple Watch ;-).
>Introduced in 1989, it is popular for its low price [$12.95] and long battery life. Annual production of the watch is 3 million units per year.
So I do get what you're saying, and you're kind of right, but there's absurdity here in both directions. A superior product is not necessarily just one that has a bunch of features crammed into it -- it's one that solves a lot of problems without introducing new problems. If you stick text notifications into my microwave, or a charging port onto my shoes, you haven't actually improved those products.
There's a little bit of irony in having this discussion about a company like Apple, which was lauded for a long time for building interfaces that were purposeful and simple. It was the Android crew ran around talking about how iPhone was behind the curve because it couldn't do multitasking or set up FTP servers, while Apple confidently asserted that building a good, focused device was better than trying to do literally everything everywhere.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that making a product more powerful or capable is orthogonal to making it superior/inferior, and trying to equate the two concepts in either direction can lead you to absurd conclusions. Of course, for many people, the Pebble watch would not be powerful enough; they want/need the extra features in the Apple Watch, just like many people wanted/needed the extra multitasking features in early Android devices. But for people who don't need those features, the Pebble was a superior product because it did its job better and didn't introduce distractions or compromises to accommodate unnecessary features.
It's good that powerful smartwatches exist, but it's unfortunate that there's now an unsatisfied niche of people who are left wanting a more elegant, purposefully designed device that costs less money. At least (thankfully for me) the Apple Watch didn't mean the end of good old-fashioned Casio and Timex watches, because for all of its power, the Apple Watch isn't capable of helping me with my ADHD. It's too complicated and has too many significant tradeoffs to be even useable as a daily driver the way I want to use it, regardless of how much it costs.
Remember the Apple Watch Edition? The one with a gold case that cost 17 grand?
The point wasn't to sell it, although there's a stratum of customer who always get the most expensive version of whatever they're getting.
The point was to make the entry-level price look reasonable, and it worked.
IIRC most gold watches are 12-14k for durability.