Steven Sande for Apple World Today:
What this tells us, of course, is that for a lot more people, the Apple Watch Sport may be the model that they’ll go for. The price is right and they get the same functionality as the $10,000 model with a lot less pretentiousness.
I couldn’t disagree more. I think, if anything, this will push people upmarket—not downmarket—to the Apple Watch collection, away from the Apple Watch Sport collection.
Here’s why:
It’s the iPad effect. When iPad launched in 2010, everyone thought it would be priced at $1000. When it was just $500, it was even more of a must-have item.
The same will be true for Apple Watch collection. Gruber thought the Edition might fall closer to the $10,000 - $20,000 range.
With such a price differential between Apple Watch and Apple Watch Edition, people will overwhelmingly flock to the former instead of the latter. The difference in cost between the lowest Sport model and the highest Watch model is around $600. The difference between the lowest Watch and highest Edition is around $16,000. There’s an order of magnitude difference between the two differentials.[1]
Faced with a relatively[2] smaller price difference, why wouldn’t you get a model in the Apple Watch collection instead of Apple Watch Sport?