Apple Sold up to 4.2 Million Apple Watches, Analysts Estimate

Crunching figures based on Apple’s opaque remarks this week, analysts estimate Apple sold two million to 4.2 million Apple Watches in its debut quarter, making it the most successful smartwatch launch to date.

Jupiter Research projects that Apple sold two million to 2.5 million Apple Watches from its April 24 launch through the end of June. That’s in line with what many Wall Street analysts, including Stanford C. Bernstein and Piper Jaffray, estimated following Apple’s fiscal third quarter investor call on Tuesday.

With the lack of disclosure from Apple, analysts broke out their divining rods to conjure numbers, buried in a catchall category called “other” that captures a range of products, including iPods, Beats headphones and Apple TV. That category grew by about $1 billion from the prior quarter — though Apple executives said the watch represented more than 100 percent of that growth and that watch sales were well above that $1 billion figure.

Jupiter arrived at the projection by parsing other remarks. Apple noted that it sold more Apple Watches in its launch period than it did the first iPhone or the iPad. Apple sold one million iPhones within 74 days and two million iPads in 60 days, which would put the wearable somewhere north of two million and on track to sell some seven million Apple Watches by the end of the year.

“This makes it the most successful smartwatch launch to date, with no other launches coming close in a comparable time period,” said Jupiter devices analyst James Moar.

Other analysts offered even more robust projections for Apple’s entry into wearable devices.

Strategy Analytics and Canalys project Apple sold some four to 4.2 million Apple Watches in three months to capture the dominant share of the still-nascent consumer products category. Global shipments of these devices reached a record 5.3 million in the second quarter of the year, an exponential increase from the one million smartwatches shipped in the prior year, according to Strategy Analytics.

Strategy Analytics

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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