Global smartwatch shipments fell 7% YoY in 2024, the market's first ever decline; Apple fell 19% while Huawei grew 35%, Xiaomi grew 135%, and Samsung grew 3%.

Here's an idea. Perhaps watches are items with a legacy of lasting years and years? With people wanting to treat them as such? Once the market is saturated and prospective customers already satisfied with what they have, of course you'll stop selling them.

Judging by the comments here, my wife and I are anomalies, but I love my Apple Watch. It’s helped my fitness goals, it’s far less awkward when I get a message and on-call notification than digging out my phone, and I can instantly hang up on spam calls/marketers and phone calls coming in when I don’t care to talk.

It also let us put our phone down and leave it somewhere in the house, which has greatly helped prevent doom scrolling and screen time (and increased my mental health). I don’t have to worry about missing a call or message, but I don’t have to have a huge screen in my pocket at all times. I honestly have been tempted to forgo a smartphone and just get an LTE watch instead to break that cycle, but my job requires it at this time.

All that said, I’ve got a Series 4. It’s now 6+ years old, still works fine, does everything I need and more and still lasts the day without battery issues. It’s been a solid performer and I’m keeping it as long as I can because that’s what you do with a watch.

Regular smart watches are such a luxury good that I'm surprised they've been growing up until last year. Realistically most people don't need a smart phone that's more than like $300 and I can't imagine spending more than that on a smart watch which just duplicates most of the features of a smart phone (and adds a few more sensors if you're lucky).

The rise in kids smart watches is a bit alarming to me, though. If the reason for it is truly that parents want to track their kids more, that's really bad for the kids for two big reasons. First being that kids need to learn how to behave without their parents always watching, and second is that if the parent can see where the kid is then probably so can the company who made the smart watch. Maybe they'll make a smartwatch which sends location data over something like the Signal protocol to mitigate 3rd party tracking, but I doubt there's a big enough demand for that for any of the major companies to do that on their own.

Totally get it. I love my Garmin, but would prefer a classic dumb watch over a Galaxy Watch (which I had before) or any other that requires charging more than once every week and which I wouldn't be comfortable with getting wet (even though they should handle it well).

Notifications are the main feature for me, I was never a heavy smart phone user and the notifications on my watch allow me to pay even less attention to my phone. In addition I can deal with deletion of unwanted emails immediately instead of doing them in bulk every few days like I would otherwise. Saves me a lot of stress, YMMV.

its good to triage your notifications without jumping on the phone. its also been useful to see my pulse at times, great for a silent timer.