Remember how tablets were really, really popular for a few years, but then people stopped caring about them after a while? Well the same thing is happening to the wearable market at the moment, except wearables haven’t even come close to being as popular as tablets, and whereas it took the tablet market a few years to start shrinking, the wearable market started shrinking after a few months. Not even Apple’s entrance into the market was enough to save it. 

The wearables market hasn’t quite taken off in quite the way that many manufacturers were likely hoping for and research from Argus Insights suggests that consumers have become increasingly apathetic towards the market this year. Before we delve any deeper, we should point out that the research doesn’t use actual sales data, but instead infers trends through the collation of user product reviews and social media conversations. To summarise the findings, wearables enjoyed their strongest levels of consumer interest just before the end of 2014, with many brands seeing a boost in popularity around the holiday season. However, since then interest growth has dropped off sharply. The big release at the end of last year was the Apple Watch, and there was a lot of pressure on the device to break current trends and push wearables into the mainstream. Indeed, interest in wearables rose greatly around the launch of Apple’s smartwatch, but consumer YoY demand has since faded quickly from this peak and interest is actually lower than it was last year.