by IDC is out with some fairly useless smartwatch numbers for Q2 2016. Useless, because companies tend to not actually say how many smartwatches they’ve sold, yet there’s IDC saying it for them. Still it does give us an idea of where the industry analysts think smartwatches are or where they think they’re going. Engadget and MacRumors both ran reports on the IDC release, They say Apple is leagues ahead of runner-up Samsung, though Samsung is believed by the firm to have played a bit of catch-up.
The MacRumors piece says Samsung did close the gap with strong 51% year-over-year growth and a nine-point rise in market share. Big as that sounds, Samsung only sold 600,000 smartwatches in the June quarter, according to the firm.
Apple on the other hand sold nearly three times as many of its watches, yet still managed to lose market share. IDC says the Cupertino company sold 1.6 million of its wearables last quarter. Think back and we will remember that comparing Apple Watch sales for Q2 2016 to sales for Q2 2015 is sort of silly. That’s because Q2 2015 was the first quarter of Apple Watch availability, landing on the heels of over a year of rumor and over six months of hype. The Engadget piece says the lack of updated hardware is a key reason for the drop in numbers for smart watches overall. It’s unclear though whether that’s IDC’s supposition or Engadget’s.
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