Analysts predict more than 20 million people will buy an Apple Watch

A failure by Apple’s standards is comparable to a success by the standards of most other companies, but a success by Apple’s standards isn’t even achievable by anyone else. While every company with a smartwatch managed to sell less than seven million smartwatches combined in 2014, Apple managed to reach a million Apple watch sales in a single day, and that’s just a fraction of what’s to come, according to analysts. 

The Apple Watch became available for pre-order on Friday. After a slow start, analysts called the pricey little gadget’s debut “respectable”. Several analysts estimated Apple received about 1 million pre-orders. Apple, which usually provides numbers after a weekend launch, has not confirmed the numbers. In lieu of any official numbers from the company, many media outlets have turned to third-party data from Slice Intelligence, an online shopping data firm, which estimates that nearly one million people pre-ordered the watch on Friday. But again, it’s worth stressing that these are in no way official numbers. Still, if the magic number is 1 million pre-orders, the boxy little device is off to a rockier start than some industry watchers had anticipated. Analysts were scrambling to figure out whether Apple had correctly judged supply and demand — and price. For the devoted community of Apple geeks, there’s no greater object of gadget lust than the Apple Watch, but the challenge is getting a hold of one.