True story: If you go to your dictionary app right now and look up “gullible”, there’s a picture of a tech reporter.
The Macalope has railed against the ridiculous use of surveys since the dawn of time. Or, well, at least 2006. And somehow it never seems to stop. A new survey comes out and it doesn’t matter if it’s of 11 people, it’ll be used to predict Apple doom. And when the Macalope says 11 people, he mean exactly 11 people. Pretty soon we’re going to get down to a report noting that “Earl and Karl hanging out in front of the Tastee Freeze do not plan on buying an Apple Watch.”
CNBC frets “Is interest in the Apple Watch dissipating?” (tip o’ the antlers to JoAnn Welsh and AppleInsider)
According to a new study by MBLM, a brand intimacy agency, millennials are dissatisfied with the watch.
AppleInsider caught the fact that this is all based on a survey by MBLM of 11 participants over a range of ages, most of whom actually had fairly positive views of the Apple Watch. Sometimes you have to dig really deep to find that nugget of Apple doom fool’s gold. It’s unrewarding work that feeds the foulest of your inner demons, but the click-through rate is good, so…
People also keep trotting out numbers from Slice Intelligence to show the Apple Watch isn’t selling well. Heck, it hasn’t even killed the Fitbit yet (tip o’ the antlers to @JonyIveParody)! It’s had weeks!
No one who quotes Slice, however, likes to mention that Slice’s numbers are based on an opt-in service that scans your email. Do the kind of people who would sign up for a service like that sound like they’d be Apple customers? The Macalope’s not even sure if they’re human. More like some kind of mindless, service-subscribing automatons.
It’s not exactly like the evidence that the Apple Watch is doing awesome is that obviously solid, either. Morgan Stanley reports that interest in the Apple Watch is 20 percent higher than interest in the iPhone was at this point in its life.
Studies of “interest” don’t impress the horny one as much as actual reports of sales. One can have “interest” in canoodling with Tom Hardy or Hayley Atwell, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.
So, so much interest. And, yet, no canoodling. Zero. Not a single canoodle.
Here’s how AppleInsider describes Morgan Stanley’s research:
The AlphaWise survey compiles sell-through data using Web search analysis.
Uh, OK, that sounds like maybe it’s more valid than “we talked to 11 people” but who knows? Did they use Google? That might skew the results a bit.
Before freaking out one way or the other over a survey on an Apple product (or anything, really), always read the actual survey, try to find out how it was conducted and ask yourself if the company conducting the survey might have an interest in it turning out one way or another (salacious results tend to get more attention).
Or just spend your time daydreaming about canoodling with movie stars. It’s about as productive.