As the Verge reports, this will be Google's first wearable product since the failed Google Glass, which was pulled from shelves in 2016.
The watch won't be a full-fledged wearable
It’s hard to evaluate how exactly Pixel Watch sales are contributing to the overall wearable market; there aren’t many other watches on the market to compare it to. So for now, it’s hard to say if this is a sign that Google is serious about Wear OS that it’s going to keep the smartwatch market alive. But if nothing else, I think we
Throughout its history with hardware, Google launched smartphones, laptops, and smart home products, but for the longest time, it didn’t offer a smartwatch. That changed with the Pixel Watch last year. Aside from a bunch of first-timer mistakes, it was a solid product and one of the best smartwatches your money can buy, and a decent reflection of Google’s vision of Wear OS. Despite its reviews criticizing things like poor battery life and a high price tag, it seems to be selling pretty well — contributing enough sales to keep Google in the second spot in wearable sales globally.
While it’s pretty tough to get any sort of reliable sales figures on any brand of wearable, Canalys does claim that Google shipped over 2.5 million Pixel Buds in 2019. That makes for about 3.4% of Google’s wearable shipments, so it’s still a drop in the bucket. The combination of the watch and Buds is actually supposed to be able to compete with
As per a new Canalys report (via 9to5Google), Google managed to ship 880,000 Pixel Watch units in 2022, making for a considerable chunk of its wearable sales last year. It’s far from being Google’s best-selling wearable, though. Google owns Fitbit, and Fitbit is actually a pretty decently popular fitness brand, so the majority of Google’s sales are from Fitbit devices. 880,000 units in a planet with 8 billion people might sound like a drop in a bucket, but almost one million out of the four million wearable devices shipped in total is not bad at all. That’s especially true if you consider the Pixel Watch was released in the last quarter of 2022, going on sale in October 2022, so it made for a quarter of Google’s wearable shipments in just a little over two months.