Gruber deserves a prize of some sort of most concentrated example of cognitive dissonance ever put into writing for this post. It's really one of the worst of the worst I've seen.
I am no Gruber fan and I am no Apple fanboi, but I think his points are dead on in this post. He is hedging his bets, repeatedly, but given that we know so little about the Apple Watch, that seems reasonable. At any rate, the main point of the article being that the iWatch is not a play into the Wearables market, but rather a move into the much more lucrative luxury watch market. Given how bloated that market is and the value that the Apple name bestows on its products, I think that it's a reasonable assumption. That being said, his "Apple is not a technology company" line is weak. That's like trying to argue that WalMart isn't in the retail business, but rather distribution. You see... they do distribution better than any other company in their space (which is retail) therefore they are in distribution.
I respectfully disagree with your generous assessment of this post.
I think if he had basically said something more like "IMHO, Apple Watch looks better to me than any of the Android devices out there" I'd be fine. But all this weird egalitarian bullshit, and backpedaling on his previous claims of disappointment was impossibly tiring.
But I do agree that If there's a real point to made in his conjecture of where Apple is going with their prices, it's not only pushing upscale, but in a more Apple-y way, pulling upscale down. Meaning, bringing luxury items and buying habits into the mass market.
Loads of people can afford a $500 watch, they just don't buy them because
a) They don't need watches anymore
b) If they do, there's a $20 watch at Ross/Marshalls that looks good enough and will get the job done.
I think Apple is going to build a market for smart watches in a way that Google and Android can't because of their superior marketing and built in buying market. In 5 years, the thought of not owning a smartwatch will seem odd, but now the entire market will be in the $500 on up space instead of fighting it out at the lower price points.
After all, Apple has built entire markets on things that we got along just fine without, mp3 players, smartphones, tablets, why not watches?
I have to agree with you that he really did outdo himself on this one. His posts generally have one of his many hallmarks but this one seems to have quite a tangle of all of those.
