SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the wating-for-ring-sized-wearables dept.
The wearable tech industry will treble inside the next five years – with a whopping 245 million devices expected to ship in 2019.
That's according to CCS Insight's Wearables Forecast, Worldwide, 2015-2019, which states that the shipments for 2015 will be around 84 million units. That's a growth in monetary value of 64 per cent; from $15 billion in 2015 to $25 billion in 2019.
The analyst states fitness and activity trackers will account for more than half of the 2019 market in terms of units shipped, but smartwatches will make up more than 50 per cent of the revenue.
Smartwatches are obviously more expensive than fitness bands – especially given the decreasing prices of the latter thanks to budget-friendly brands like Xiaomi. The Chinese company has $15 tracker currently on sale – the Mi Band. The report claims that China overtook the US to become the biggest market for fitness trackers in 2015.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday November 02 2015, @01:35PM
Don't forget early adopter-itis. This is new and "cool" fad in China but I've had my fitbit for awhile, no longer care about it, and next time I launder it I'm not buying another. I don't even read the emails with my stats anymore. It was an interesting fad for awhile. The future is already here just unevenly distributed and lots of people here live way into the future. For the sake of argument, if the fad only has legs for a couple years and some of us are about a decade into the future, then we're going to look at fads of our past like boring people would look at corduroy bell bottoms today.
Early adopter-itis also kicks in with prices. iPhones aren't $120/month anymore, or so I hear. Until about two years ago, for decades I "knew" that HDTVs all cost $5K+ so they're simply out of my budget. "Wait, WTF, HDTV the size of my living room window is cheaper than my window? WTF? Guess I'll buy one now that its only hundreds instead of tens of thousands, when did this happen?" So its the same thing with "fitness trackers" I think my first fitbit was over $100 many years ago, now only semi-surprised there are Chinese clone ripoffs that work just as well/poorly for $15 now.
Lets say you have a discussion board for rock collecting geologists. And the pet rock phenomena kicks off. True, folks who currently hang out on Jezebel and Huffpo are going to find pet rocks the most fascinating new thing they've ever heard of because being fresh meat is their purpose. But the rock collectors who had gneiss back before gneiss was cool are naturally not going to be overly impressed that millions are picking up pieces of gravel.
(Score: 2) by joshuajon on Monday November 02 2015, @05:11PM
There's a joke about Pebble [pebble.com] in here somewhere...