Demand for Wearable Devices is Slowing

Wearables, once the hot tech gadget, have cooled off in demand amid growing interest in smart speakers, co-ordinate to one enquiry firm.

Despite products like the Apple Lookout man, simply 20 percentage of the Usa population will employ a wearable side by side year, eMarketer said in a report last week.

Sales for wearables, which include fitness trackers, volition abound, merely at a slow footstep. Starting in 2022, wearable usage will just increase twelvemonth-over-year by unmarried digits, the research house said.

eMarketer Wearable Chart

Role of the trouble is that smartwatches tin be too expensive, some times starting at around $300. In addition, no wearable device has become a must-have detail like a smartphone, eMarketer said. This all suggests wearables have a ways to get to gaining mass market adoption in the U.s..

"Instead, for this holiday season, nosotros wait smart speakers to exist the gift of choice for many tech enthusiasts, because of their lower toll points," eMarketer annotator Cindy Liu said in a statement.

Sales on Amazon are already supporting these findings. On Tuesday, the company said its Echo Dot, which goes for $29.99, was its number 1 selling production during the vacation season.

But fifty-fifty equally customer demand for wearables is waning, the smartwatch category itself is still showing signs of life.

Annual smartwatch shipments across the earth volition more than double over the next five years, co-ordinate to research firm IDC. By 2022, they'll attain 150 one thousand thousand units, up from the estimated 61.5 million expected to ship out this year.

Driving the growth volition be new vendors, such every bit fashion brands, that want to tap smartwatch sales. Withal, demand for fettle bands will stagnate.

Currently, shipments for fitness bands account for twoscore pct of all habiliment shipments, merely that figure will autumn to 21 percent by 2022. "Such wearables are quickly becoming commodities and IDC anticipates low single-digit growth in this category," it said.

In the US, eMarketer expects smartwatch adoption volition experience double-digit annual growth until 2022 as demand falls. By then, simply effectually 10 pct of the population will utilize smartwatches.