- The global smartwatch market fell 7% in 2024, the first ever decline in the overall market.
- Apple retained its top position, despite a 19% YoY decline in shipments due to tighter competition and weaker upgrade cycles.
- China captured the biggest shipment share for the first time, driven by the strong performance of Chinese brands including Huawei, Xiaomi and BBK (Imoo).
- Kids smartwatch was the only segment to witness a rise, as parents’ awareness increased, and brands expanded in this category.
Judging by the comments here, my wife and I are anomalies, but I love my Apple Watch. It’s helped my fitness goals, it’s far less awkward when I get a message and on-call notification than digging out my phone, and I can instantly hang up on spam calls/marketers and phone calls coming in when I don’t care to talk.
It also let us put our phone down and leave it somewhere in the house, which has greatly helped prevent doom scrolling and screen time (and increased my mental health). I don’t have to worry about missing a call or message, but I don’t have to have a huge screen in my pocket at all times. I honestly have been tempted to forgo a smartphone and just get an LTE watch instead to break that cycle, but my job requires it at this time.
All that said, I’ve got a Series 4. It’s now 6+ years old, still works fine, does everything I need and more and still lasts the day without battery issues. It’s been a solid performer and I’m keeping it as long as I can because that’s what you do with a watch.
I just sold my Pixel Watch and bought a Withings Scanwatch.
Daily charging is annoying. I stopped using it to pay because then I’d have to set up a PIN, and then type in the PIN every time I want to use it. I’m not without my phone and it’s more convenient to pay with.
I did like the health monitoring features, but the daily charging made it intrusive and another thing I had to actively monitor.
Scanwatch gives me 30 days of battery, all the health tracking, and some basic notifications, which is fine but I’d get it even without that.
Regular smart watches are such a luxury good that I’m surprised they’ve been growing up until last year. Realistically most people don’t need a smart phone that’s more than like $300 and I can’t imagine spending more than that on a smart watch which just duplicates most of the features of a smart phone (and adds a few more sensors if you’re lucky).
The rise in kids smart watches is a bit alarming to me, though. If the reason for it is truly that parents want to track their kids more, that’s really bad for the kids for two big reasons. First being that kids need to learn how to behave without their parents always watching, and second is that if the parent can see where the kid is then probably so can the company who made the smart watch. Maybe they’ll make a smartwatch which sends location data over something like the Signal protocol to mitigate 3rd party tracking, but I doubt there’s a big enough demand for that for any of the major companies to do that on their own.
Pebble ftw
Is Pebble still alive? I quit using mine a long time ago because I wound up getting an AW, but I’ve still kept it somewhere
If I could get a classic dumb watch with just the ability to vibrate when my phone gets an alert, I’d be soooooo happy.
I was under the impression that fossil had a classic watch that either made a sound or flashed a small light when a notification came in. Connected to phone via BT, so the power cost was “minimal”. Not sure if they make those watches anymore but it’s worth a look if you are interested.
I am very interested. I’ll look into that, thank you!
Edit from Fossil: We are no longer selling smartwatches.
Phooey!
