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Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

Fossil has a brand equity problem that Google certainly knows about. The brand peaked before the smartwatch market even existed, and their smartwatch sales peaked almost 10 years ago.

Fossil Group’s traditional watches including vanity labels like Michael Kors are completely lacking in prestige and desirability.

I would also throw them straight under the bus with Samsung as my alternative. That’s a no-brainer.

The other problem is that the smartwatch market isn’t robust enough for a lot of players. A good smartwatch needs a lot of tech that only a large company can produce. At the same time, it’s not really a product with a lot of future potential above and beyond what it does right now.

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I would argue with that slightly. Only because I'm awaiting a GPT powered watch similar to a sci-fi terminal any day now. No screen, just microphone and some response mechanism.

That concept is just an app or an OS feature on an Apple Watch or a smartphone (with or without wireless headphone/mic).

It’s Siri whenever Siri gets hooked up to a LLM, which will probably happen within the next year or two. I’m not sure why this idea would take the form of a watch.

The reason why watches still have faces is:

1. To be fashionable

2. To see the time and other information quickly without speaking

Otherwise, there is no reason to buy one. The “smart” in the smartwatch is frosting on top of the cake. The “cake” is the watch’s main function as jewelry that tells time.

People all stopped wearing watches when they got phones because they didn't need the time on their wrist constantly. Now they want notifications on their wrist constantly, that's what the cake of the smartwatch is, not the time. And the Apple Watch is ugly as hell, it's no jewelry.

People stopped wearing watches? Then how is industry revenue growing?

https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/watch-ma...

https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/accessories/watches-jew...

Of course it’s jewelry. If it wasn’t there wouldn’t be a gazillion different band and finish colors. Apple switches watch bands out seasonally and changes the available metal finishes of the device with every iteration.

It might not be jewelry you like, but it’s jewelry.

There are two watch markets - utilitarian, and jewelry.

The utilitarian market was all people wearing cheap Casios and Seikos just to see the time. These people stopped wearing watches when they started carrying mobile phones (not even smartphones, this happened in the 00's).

The Apple Watch brought these people back for utility - either seeing notifications on their wrist, or health/sports tracking. People still don't really need to see the time on their wrist, phones even have always-on OLED screens now.

Now that you've decided to wear an Apple Watch, of course you're going to choose a band that looks nice, sure that part is jewelry, but not any more than a smartphone case. But nobody goes "oh wow that Apple Watch band is gorgeous, I'm going to buy and start wearing an Apple Watch for it"

I don't think there is much to glean from the industry revenue because there's so much noise going on (the massive growth of the Chinese luxury market from zero)

It’s still jewelry. Like I said, it’s not just the bands, Apple changes the device finishes every time they release a new product.

And yes, I would argue that a smartphone case is jewelry. I would argue that the phones themselves are also jewelry!

The fact that Apple brought back people who had stopped wearing watches just shows that there was demand for that sort of thing, and it was being unmet by traditional watches. People still want to see the time quickly but they now demand more than that.

Yes, we segment out the luxury watch and commodity watch markets. Both of those markets are growing as a whole.

I thought this was the future, too, but I think there has to be a shared display that you can relay/validate the output together (with the GPT) on. It has to be able to draw a thing, quickly, show you what it's thinking -- voice is too slow to be the single medium of interaction.

I wonder why google are taking so long to integrate bard with assistant?

Seems like a no brainer move.

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