On April 24, 2015, the Apple Watch went on sale. It was the first new product category Apple had launched since the iPad in 2010, and the first major new product overseen by Tim Cook rather than Steve Jobs. The expectations attached to it were enormous, partly because of what the previous Apple new-category launches had done, and partly because of the long stretch of time during which Apple had not launched anything quite like it.
The product itself was technically impressive. The hardware density was significant for a wearable. The integration with iPhone was tight in ways that made the experience feel coherent in a way most early smartwatches did not. The crown-based interaction model was a thoughtful response to the screen-size problem that touch alone did not solve well at this scale.
The criticism was real and turned out to be substantively correct. The use case for the Apple Watch was less clear than the use case for the iPhone or the iPad had been at launch. The notifications-on-your-wrist value was real but bounded. The fitness tracking was good but not yet definitive. The ability to do things on the watch that you could not do faster on the phone in your pocket was limited. The first version of the operating system was slow in ways that affected daily use.
What Apple Watch represented was less an immediate change in how people interacted with computing and more an early bet that wearables would matter eventually, and that being early to the category with a polished product would build a position competitors would struggle to displace later. That bet was correct over a longer time horizon than the launch reception suggested. By the time the watch reached its third or fourth generation, the fitness and health features had matured into something genuinely useful, the operating system had become responsive, and the watch had become the dominant smartwatch by a wide margin.
The lesson worth drawing from the launch was about expectations. The technology industry had been conditioned by the iPhone launch to expect that new Apple categories would feel transformative immediately. The Apple Watch took longer to find its purpose. That pattern, products that take several iterations to become what they will eventually be, would become more common across the technology landscape in the years that followed.