Here’s a shocker: When you ask people who have worked on wearable computers that will go head-to-head with Apple what they think about the Apple Watch, they don’t like it. Business Insider’s Jay Yarow recently spoke with an anonymous person who “has worked on wearable technology” and who thinks that the Apple Watch is a nonstarter because it doesn’t look attractive.
“For a wearable to succeed, people have to want to wear it,” Yarow’s source explained. “A black screen sitting on someone’s wrist will not look good, and therefore, the product will fail.”
Yarow isn’t quite sure he buys that argument as he thinks the watch looks pretty good and will be seen as a status symbol thanks to Apple’s brand power alone. However, he also writes that his source’s criticism of the Apple Watch “almost exactly echoed what another person from the wearables industry told us late last year.”
Of course, there definitely are questions about the Apple Watch’s future as there are about smartwatches in general. While we’re still in the early going, there are reasons to believe that smartwatches just aren’t useful enough in their current forms to really spur mass consumer adoption.
None of those arguments, however, have anything to do with whether or not the Apple Watch is too ugly to succeed.
