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 have 3 Pebble Time watches, 2 of them still in the box, to replace someday the one I wear for already 3 years. Paid $150.00 for each of them.
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.
> 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 ;-).
For some people it is. I got a digital wristwatch to help with time blindness associated with my ADHD. It beeps every hour, and it has vibration alarms for appointments, timers, alarms, etc... I very purposefully did not get a smartwatch, because a simple watch that I can wear everywhere, that I never forget to charge, that will never develop a glitch or need to be updated, with an interface that is hyper-focused and does exactly what I need without distractions -- that's a superior product for me. And the fact that it was only $35 is a bonus, but it would still be a superior product even if it was $200. The cost isn't the reason it's superior.
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.
That doesn't say anything about the parent comment. I also had the pebble time steel but now use an apple watch s6. The AW probably does 4x what the pebble did making it look like a bulky notifications window on my arm.
I mean if all you need is a watch with a customisable watch face sure, but you are clearly overlooking several things like inbuilt eeg, lte connectivity etc of you dont need them its okay, but pebbles are no way near apple watch.
More than make the price reasonable, I would wager it was to anchor the Apple Watch in the "watch" category, rather than the "electronic gadget" category in people's mind. It's not some $XXX toy for notifications and whatever. Much like watches, it is as much about functionality as it about style. Much like watches, it both exists in a expensive, luxury form and in an everyday form. You're buying a Swatch, with Rolex available if you want - not a fitibit.
on top of that, they created their own gold alloy for it. One that allowed them to use less gold at the same karat weight! For that, you paid a premium. Genius.
The melt value of the gold was well under $3000, for a $17000 watch. Even it it had been solid 24k 99.9 fine (I believe it was 14k gold), it would have been a small fraction of the cost, and a low volume item to boot. I doubt the custom alloy contributed significantly to their margin.
