More and more data points suggest consumers just don’t care much about the Apple Watch—at least not compared to how much they care about new iPhones. Today is the official launch day, and social media users aren’t really talking much about the gadget.
Apple Watch launch kept low-key
TheySay, a social media sentiment analysis tool, teamed up with the University of Oxford to measure what people are saying about the Apple Watch today. It’s no secret that Apple kept today’s launch very low-key. It’s been reported that the reason the launch was done rather quietly was because Apple was worried about having enough supply to keep up with demand.
TheySay CTO and founder Dr. Karo Moilanen, who is also a visiting academic at Oxford University, noted that the quietness of today’s launch not only runs counter-culture to Apple’s typical product launches but also to the product announcement. She suggests that people may simply be getting tired of hearing about the Apple Watch, so they’re suffering from a sort of “social media burnout” on the topic.
“The exclusive nature of the Apple Watch release means that the lack of queues outside stores has been reflected by low traffic on social media,” cofounder Dr. Moilanen said. “Despite positive sentiment surrounding the watch – 80% of Twitter users have praised this novel piece of wearable tech – tweet volume has been underwhelming across the world this morning. One thing, the low noise levels included an inordinate amount of humour accompanied by a healthy smattering of sarcasm.”
Apple Watch comments mostly positive
TheySay found that while most of the comments about the Apple Watch that were made on social media are positive, the number of comments is lower than expected. In terms of negative comments, people are complaining about the lack of lines at Apple Stores.
Other complaints are about “the lack of truly mind-blowing, could-not-have-predicted-that features” and, on the other spectrum, the inclusion of some features that are too complicated. Further, there are some negative complaints related to iFixit’s teardown of the Apple Watch, which suggests that there can’t be any internal chip upgrades in spite of previous reports that suggested the chips could be upgraded.
The firm also found that social media users are making some obviously sarcastic comments about the Apple Watch or about its launch.
Apple Watch sentiment by the numbers
At the time of analysis, TheySay had collected about 83,638 tweets about the smartwatch, of which 80% were positive and 20% were negative. They noted that there were about 5.8 times more happy comments than sad comments and 3.4 times more people who “like it” than “dislike it.” Additionally, they found that there were 2.6 times more calm comments than agitated ones and just 1.5% of those tweets were angry in tone.
Twenty-five percent of the tweets they analyzed were sarcastic or humorous in nature.
