There was a moment, roughly six months after its introduction, when it seemed like every single person on earth was carrying around an iPhone.
It didn’t start that way, though. In the first month of their availability, it was an internationally-recognised badge of the nerd, of what marketers call the “early adopter”, the gadget geek who needs to be the first person in his circle to have the latest thing.
Only a few people had them. When you spotted someone with an iPhone, you felt perfectly comfortable intruding on their conversation – “Hey, do you like that? Is the touchscreen OK? Is the sound quality good?” – and in fact they seemed to relish the attention. The kind of person who is first in the queue for the newest and trendiest electronic toy is the kind of person who likes lording it over everyone else.
During the iPhone’s first four weeks, it probably seemed like they had sold a lot more than they had, because the people who bought them refused to hide them away in their pockets. Every iPhone sold, in those early days, was out and on display. And as a small-minded and petty person, I was secretly hoping the whole product would be a terrible failure because the early adopters were so irritating.
I didn’t get my wish. Because suddenly, without warning, iPhones really were everywhere. I don’t recall the transition being a gradual one, either. One week they were here and there, sparsely distributed in business class cabins and smarter restaurants, in the hands of show-offs and blow-hards, and then bang! They were all over the place. We all had them: kids, adults, businessmen, grandparents.
After that initial launch, the iPhone became one of the most successful consumer products of all time. There are probably more than 500 million iPhones in use worldwide. The iPhone, to use the parlance of Hollywood, is a giant blockbuster hit. It is Star Wars and Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings all piled together.
Which makes assessing the relative success of the Apple Watch, which was introduced with great fanfare this spring – a complicated endeavour.
In the first place, Apple won’t tell us how many watches it’s sold. But it’s safe to say it’s nowhere near the number of iPhones sold at roughly the equivalent time after its launch. And using the entirely unscientific and, frankly, statistically indefensible method of estimating how many watches I’ve seen on the wrists of non-nerds and show-offs, it’s safe to say that the Apple Watch is a disappointment. The fact that I haven’t been annoyed by Apple Watch owners suggests that the product isn’t a success.
That’s certainly the verdict from some segments of the business and technology press. This past week has seen dozens of juicy headlines using very Hollywood language: the Apple Watch is a “flop”, they blared. The fancy smartwatch is a “bomb”, some said, as if it’s just the latest instalment of the Bourne series of action pictures instead of the first iteration of a highly sophisticated technology product.
But true Hollywood professionals – and, I suppose, the clever executives at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California – know that the terms “flop” and “hit” are often meaningless. A movie that fails in the cinema can easily have a second – or third – life on cable television. Sometimes, in fact, that’s where a movie finds its audience, and garners enough excitement to justify a sequel.
The feature film Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for instance, did poorly in the cinema but was memorable enough to launch a television series of the same name, which went on to enormous success. So was the movie a “flop”? It depends on when you made the call.
The successes are equally murky. If you adjust for the effects of inflation on movie ticket prices, the highest grossing movie of all time is Gone With the Wind, which had its premiere in 1939. Also on the list of the top 10 biggest grossing pictures are The Sound of Music, Doctor Zhivago, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, all of which premièred well before 1970. Big blockbusters like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings are not even close.
So which movies were more successful? You could argue that Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings have the rest beat because they introduced long-running series of hit movies. Taken as a whole, those series – which would have to include other movie series like Fast & Furious and Iron Man – have made piles and piles of money. The prognosticators and the “experts” are almost always wrong.
It’s the same with the Apple Watch. The company probably hasn’t sold as many as they wish they had – what company ever sells as many of any of its products as it wishes? – but they’ve convinced a whole lot of people to wear a tiny computer on their wrists, and if the past is any indication, they’ll keep convincing more people every day. We will all, soon enough, be thoroughly irritated by people sporting Apple Watches. And then, suddenly, we’ll be wearing them ourselves.
Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood
On Twitter: @rcbl