Yahoo Finance Apple Watch delay may anger fanboys and girls but shouldn't hurt company
Planning on camping out in front of an Apple (AAPL) store next week to get your Apple Watch? Well, put the folding chair and pillows away - you’re out of luck. An internal memo that has leaked across several Apple fanboy blogs says the hottest new gadget won’t hit store shelves for a while, potentially sometime in June.
The memo from Apple retail chief Angela Ahrendts says in part:
...due to high global interest combined with our initial supply, we are only taking orders online right now. I’ll have more updates as we get closer to in-store availability, but we expect this to continue through the month of May.
To be clear, if you ordered your watch online to be delivered on the original release date of April 24, you should expect it on time. Apple has, however, removed that date from all aspects of their promotional push as anyone who hasn’t already ordered one won’t see that watch anytime remotely close to that April 24 date.
Sure, fanboys and girls hoping to walk out of an Apple store with a brand new Apple Watch on their wrist may be a bit angered, but does the sale date snafu hurt the company?
"It’s a problem because the perception was the 4/24 date was in all those Apple ads, that yeah, I could get the watch on April 24. So that is a problem for the company,” says Yahoo Finance’s Aaron Task. “I think the company would much prefer you and me and everybody else to get a watch online and they tried to signal that demand was outsripping their supply.”
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Perhaps Apple also thought better of the crazy atmosphere that surrounds normal product launches at their stores (thought Ahrendts did assure employees those days aren’t gone completely).
“I think they don’t want the circus and the huge lines,” says Yahoo Finance’s Senior Columnist Michael Santoli, “not just because it creates a problem for them but just because it’s not an efficient way to sell your product.”
So while any delay may not be great for a select few it probably says less about the popularity of the item itself and a little more about Apple hedging its bets on an untested product category.
Santoli wonders if Tim Cook and the rest at Apple “were just as skeptical as a lot of us were about saying ‘who really wants this thing?’”
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