LONDON: The Apple Watch is the first new product category from the company that radically transformed computing with the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010. The watch brings now-familiar technologies like a touchscreen and apps to your wrist, but to succeed, Apple must convince buyers to spend anywhere from $350 to $17,000 in the US on a device that they might consider an optional accessory.
It’s that extraordinary range of prices where Apple hopes to stand out from the already crowded field of smartwatches from the likes of Samsung, LG, Motorola and Sony. Apple’s rivals have presented their watches as accessories to their core smartphones and a flashy new gadget, but few have won mainstream success.
Core to Apple’s sales pitch is the idea that the Watch isn’t just a utilitarian gadget. Instead, the company is hoping to convince buyers that the Apple Watch has the cachet of timepieces that often serve as fashion statements and jewelry.
“It has to be a tool or it has to be bling-bling — or both,” said Herve Beraud, a Parisian standing amid a crowded Apple Watch display squarely in the center of the city’s Apple Store.
Customers can’t actually walk out of the store with an Apple Watch — today marks the first day you can pre-order one, but you can’t actually walk out of the store with one until its official launch day on April 24. Apple’s latest gadget is already off to a hot start in its own online store — many of the models aren’t available until July.
In Paris, where tourists come to shop for expensive coats and high-end handbags, the Apple Watch is on sale in the swanky Galeries Lafayette department store. The watches occupy the best real estate in the house, four bays beneath the architecturally iconic Belle Epoque central atrium.
Apple’s own store isn’t so lavish. But there, too, customers with appointments got their one-on-one product tours. Those without an appointment were in principle limited to looking at the array of watches under glass, but more than one customer ducked in to try a display model, too.
Curious customers were eager to see and try the watches, but many weren’t yet convinced they were worth buying.
“When a new product is out, I’m always wanting to see it,” said Philippe Li, who already owns a Samsung smartwatch he bought in 2014. But he won’t buy a first-generation Apple Watch, which he expects to be “a little bit buggy.”
But Hermann Angoula, who’s owned iPhones since the first model arrived in 2007, is already committed. He bought a leather-banded Apple Watch for €799 before even going to the store. For him, too, firsthand experience reveals more than the online videos, though, because he’s now having doubts about choosing a premium version. The lower-end Sport model is impressive and costs €399 here; the Apple Watch is twice the price, and, “I don’t think that it’s worth the difference,” he said.
One of the first appointments in Paris went to Celine Luong. “I want to see it on my wrist and touch it and try it,” she said. She’s not sure she’ll buy one, but if she did, it would be the 38mm Sport model.
Cooper Matson, a Seattle resident visiting Paris, wanted to check out the watch after seeing the display area while still cloaked the day before. But he said he can’t afford even the entry level model, much less a $10,000 Apple Watch Edition. “There are necklaces that cost that amount, so I guess it’s not that crazy,” he said.
In the Covent Garden Apple store in London, Matthew Hudson had an appointment right when the store opened at 9 a.m. to try on and order the stainless steel model with a 38 millimeter Milanese Loop band — a 21st birthday gift from his parents.
