The entire smartwatch industry is waiting for the Apple Watch

At CES 2015, there are battlegrounds everywhere. Companies have come to Las Vegas vying for space in your home, in your car, on your face, in your pocket, on your desk, and in your car and your home a few more times. But the one place no one seems to care about this January is the place everyone thought was heating up the fastest: your wrist.

During the fall of 2014, it looked like the world would soon be awash in smartwatches. Samsung, Sony, LG, Asus, Motorola, Pebble, Meta — companies big and small attempted to find out what people want their wrists to do. Devices came hard and fast: LG made the G Watch, and then immediately learned a lesson from the Moto 360 and built the G Watch R. It was a perfect setup for CES — it’s a new, immature market, it’s relatively inexpensive to build the hardware, and there’s a rabid fan base of early adopters waiting to find the next big thing. Every booth would have a smartwatch, I figured. Big companies, Kickstarter projects, everyone.

That didn’t happen. Rather than trying to solve the smartwatch riddle before Apple can even get in the market, every company here in Las Vegas appears to be waiting to see what the Apple Watch can do.

We’ve seen a few smartwatches this week, sure. But they were either hyper-specific — Audi and LG’s watch that parks your car — or targeted to a niche Apple clearly won’t compete in, like the $149 Alcatel Onetouch. The only smartwatch at the show designed for anything like a mainstream audience is the new stainless steel Sony Smartwatch 3, and that’s just a slightly nicer wrapper on a fitness-focused device. Sony’s made five smartwatches already, but it’s clearly waiting to see what Apple does before it really swings again.

For any smartwatch to catch on, it has to succeed on a few fronts. It needs to be utterly simple to understand and use. It needs to offer something genuinely new and uniquely useful. It needs to look good. It needs to be seen by users and everyone as more than a gadget — it needs to be a fashion statement, a reflection of its wearer’s personality. It’s very much an open question whether even Apple can pull off this delicate balance, but Apple’s greatest asset is its ability to convince the world that its ideas are the right ideas. Smartwatches have a marketing problem, and the industry needs Apple to solve it as only it can. So the industry is waiting.

Apple’s famous for counterprogramming CES, for leaking news or announcing events to try and steal the thunder of the show away from its competitors. This year, though, there was no event, no announcement, no leak. (Except for a SIM-free iPhone 6, but that doesn’t count.) Apple’s counterprogramming came in September, when it announced the watch that everyone – including its competitors — is waiting for. CES happens in January, and there's remarkable innovation everywhere, but the war for your wrist begins this spring.

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