Fred Wilson, a prominent startup investor and partner of Union Square Ventures, has posted a series of predictions for 2015 and his forecast isn’t looking too good for Apple’s first new product category in years.
Wilson, who has put money in Twitter, Zynga, and other large companies in their early stages, doesn’t think the Apple Watch will be able to live up to Apple devices before it like the iPhone and iPad, both of which reshaped the consumer electronics industry.
“Another market where the reality will not live up to the hype is wearables, Wilson writes. “The Apple Watch will not be the home-run product that iPod, iPhone, and iPad have been.
“Not everyone will want to wear a computer on their wrist. Eventually, this market will be realized as the personal mesh/personal cloud, but the focus on wearables will be a bit of a head-fake and take up a lot of time, energy, and money in 2015 with not a lot of results.”
T-Mobile CEO John Legere wrote earlier this week that the Apple Watch will be huge for the industry.
Furthermore, Wilson believes the “Apple of China” Xiaomi will make an entrance into the US.
“Xiaomi will spend some of the $1.1bn they just raised coming to the US. This will bring a strong player in the non-google android sector into the US market and legitimize a ‘third mobile OS’ in the western world.”
For investors, Wilson believes Apple’s stock – which gained close to 40Â percent in 2014 – will remain a great option for investors in 2015.
“Capital markets will be a mixed bag in 2015. Big tech names will continue to access capital easily, but the combination of rising rates and depressed prices for oil will bring great stress to global capital markets and there will be a noticeable flight to safety around the world. Safety used to mean gold, US treasuries, and blue chip stocks. Now it means Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook.”
[Fred Wilson via Business Insider]