They may not have been the first in the category, but those products were arguably a generation behind what apple introduced. Fitbit in particular was like comparing a flip phone to an iPhone.
WatchOS until like fall 2016 really wasn't that great. The third-party apps were all garbage and we didn't even get "native" apps until six months after the device launched and that original Apple Watch (the Series 0) was woefully underpowered for what it needed to be. I bought one and don't regret spending $800 on the stainless steel variant with the modern buckle combo, but it also got like two years of software support, and even the support was limited compared to even the low-cost Series 1 released a year later.
I don't know if they've been able to pull this off with AVP, as most people are just ignoring it.
I think if you personally are ignoring it, you probably don't notice how much other people aren't.
That said, I can't think of any of my friends who I would recommend to buy one at this stage, but I see Apple having no trouble selling as many as they can make.
But right now, supply-chain analysts suggest that they can only make 160,000 or something this year. Apple could sell literal boxes of dog shit to 160,000 people, so I don't think we really know what the size of the market is.(And incidentally, although shipping is now two or three weeks out (an improvement from two weeks ago), I can pick up an AVP from a number of stores in my area today and at another store on Saturday. I don't think we can make any assessments as to the market size/demand right now, but I will say that in-store availability one-week post release was not something we saw for the first iPad or Apple Watch. The iPad 2 was consistently out of stock its first few months, even -- and not because they were supply constrained but because Apple sold every device they got in-store.)
Is interest/intrigue/vauge knowledge super high -- yes -- it's a new Apple product, that's a given. But prodct awareness != product success.
So right now, the entire AR/VR category is expected to ship 1/3 of the number of units of just the Apple Watch. Even if Apple sells 180,000 AVPs all with an MSRP of $4000 (so I'm being extra generous here), that's only $720m in revenue, or less than 3.7% of Apple Watch sales.
And that doesn't even factor in all the Apple Watch units that are in use, which realistically, is probably 125 - 150 million units.
Does that mean AVP or headsets like it won't ever achieve Apple Watch-like sales or adoption? Not at all. But it certainly isn't now and it's probably doing the category a disservice to expect it to reach those heights anytime soon, let alone pretend that just because awareness is super high that sales are guaranteed to follow.
[1]: https://www.idc.com/promo/arvr [2]: https://medium.com/@mingchikuo/apple-watch-estimates-and-pre...