To say that Apple’s launch of the Apple Watch was a little unorthodox for the company might be an understatement: we don’t have a firm release date, nor a solid sense of pricing. Sure, Apple told us that the line will start at about $350, but with so many different options for both case materials and straps, that figure’s bound to go up quickly. But just how quickly, and how high will it get? John Gruber over at Daring Fireballmakes the case for his Apple Watch pricing theory, and it quickly sees the company blowing past that $350 mark to hit prices in the thousands of dollars.
The base idea here is that Apple’s not going after the smartwatch market, but the watch market period, and that means also tackling the luxury-priced segment. That Apple Watch Edition model isn’t just goldplated, and with as much solid gold as Apple’s using, a price tag well north of $1000 wouldn’t be so crazy. Gruber writes that his own estimate comes in at $10K, but concedes that $5000 might be a realistic starting point.
And while the aluminum Watch Sport with its glass screen might only fetch $350, even the steel Apple Watch with its sapphire display could attract a hefty premium of its own, maybe selling for $1000 itself. More than the gold Edition pricing, that one sounds a little hard to swallow, but these are uncharted waters for Apple, and it might be foolish to assume that just because it’s entering the smartwatch space that its offerings would be priced competitively with models like we get from Android Wear.
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