If this week’s earlier estimates are right, it took the Apple Watch just days to become the best-selling smartwatch of all time. While that obviously isn’t saying much, it looks like the Apple Watch is just getting started: A major new survey from Reuters suggests that Apple is going to sell 15 million Apple Watches in the United States alone.
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Reuters surveyed over 1,800 American adults earlier this month and found that roughly 6% of them say they are planning to buy an Apple Watch. Reuters comments that “if calculated based on 2014 U.S. Census projections, and excluding younger teens, this could mean potential sales of about 15 million watches, if those who said they intended to buy follow through with an actual purchase.”
While 15 million Apple Watch units sold in the U.S. isn’t exactly iPhone 6-level sales, we have to remember that this is a smartwatch we’re talking about. In general, consumers have been avoiding smartwatches like the plague — according to one estimate, vendors sold only 720,000 Android Wear watches total over the last six months of 2014.
Of course, it remains to be seen if the Apple Watch has the same staying power among early adopters that the iPod, iPhone and iPad had. However, for the time being it looks like the Apple Watch is going to be the only smartwatch that’s capable of breaking through to mainstream consumers.
