Looking at the entire wearable field in 2021, it can be said that it lost a higher growth rate before reaching the originally expected high. A closer look at the split reveals a lot of interesting details: in terms of categories, TWS headphones are almost the same as smart watches and smart bracelets combined or even more. The smart bracelet that originally supported many markets has shrunk significantly and no longer has a larger scale.
The change in brand share may seem like a small one, but in fact, there is an undercurrent. Apple's overall growth slowdown boss status is more likely to be threatened, Samsung, millet, Huawei have different degrees of profits, Huawei mobile phone business indirectly affects wearable, but the more active new product strategy to stop the downward momentum, finally, Jiaming as the representative of the professional wearable product share is small but almost no change.
Since the market data for the fourth quarter has not yet been released, it cannot be concluded that the Apple Watch Series 7 has not supported the growth of Apple's smart watch. However, the comprehensive product changes and external comments, the overall design style that has not changed for several years, the functional innovation with a small amount of progress, and the endurance performance that has not been solved have limited this high-end product to the inherent market space.
Expectations for Apple from all walks of life will certainly not be limited to this, and they all hope that this company can bring innovation like the annual iPhone in the smart watch and even the entire wearable field. Just adjust the size of the screen, the functional performance of the seam patch, it is difficult to drive the purchase demand. Therefore, whether it can bring a new Apple Watch in 2022 may affect the future of Apple wearable.
Other manufacturers are more in pursuit of stability: active noise reduction, intelligent pairing, etc. have been verified on the AirPods series, they will be in their own products at a lower price to obtain the market; long battery life and other smart wear needs Apple can not meet, insist on providing two weeks or longer battery life on the product, and in the sports health and expansion function of the former to align, eat the market outside the apple.
Overall, wearable 2021 is slightly flat, there are no revolutionary advances in products and no huge changes in market forms, there are undercurrents surging under the calm surface, and attempts to move towards the future form of smart devices.
True wireless headphones support the bulk of sales
Although from a technical point of view, only the improvement of Bluetooth headphones, but the true wireless headphones have long become the backbone of the wearable field, which also hints at the quiet transformation of its identity: from a pure personal audio device, to a decorative attributes, a variety of interactions, real-time connection of smart products. Therefore, our line of sight of true wireless headphones should also change with the product form and positioning.
The high-end market in this year seems to be a bit lackluster, AirPods Pro is still a 2,000 yuan price point to achieve the best balance of design, experience, performance of the product, sales channels perennial to give the thousand yuan preferential price is to consolidate the market position. It has also become no longer "lonely", Apple launched a Beats Fit Pro with similar functions but lower positioning, and Sony and Bose are making up for shortcomings.
The market of thousands of yuan is very interesting, AirPods 3 is late, the appearance and interaction are fully aligned with the flagship, and it is still unknown whether it can fully inherit and expand the market share of the previous generation of products. The arrival of flagship true wireless headphones from other mobile phone manufacturers, the indicators are not bad and can also have a good match with their own ecology, vowing to become an airPods Pro replacement that is more than half the official price.
Hesitant mobile phone manufacturers have the strength to get a piece of Apple's mouth in the main battlefield, but they are facing new problems in the true wireless headphone category. Most of them stay in the stage of imitating Apple, and have not brought major changes such as noise reduction or pop-up animation in performance or experience, and they do not have the attraction of convincing people other than their high-end mobile phone users to choose.
At a time when the high-end and thousand-dollar markets are trapped by their own troubles, the entry-level is full of vitality and innovation. Piano paint, clear plastic, frosted texture... It is difficult to imagine that these products that play with flowers on the outside are only a few hundred yuan, and at the same time, they also provide a variety of functions such as active noise reduction, and after the rapid progress of the experience, this price segment that is in line with the consumption power will contribute more sales.
There is no shortage of true wireless headphone products in this year, but it takes more time to blossom and bear fruit. In the process of expanding the multi-category ecology, Huawei has launched high-end new products with the main design and luxury version; Huami has brought health concepts such as heart rate monitoring to headphones to provide monitoring points other than smart watches; Xiaomi has started from the content level to build a spatial audio experience outside of Apple.
If you want to experience the first experience of the AirPods series such as active noise reduction and smart phone quick connection at low cost, 2021 will be a year that makes many "waiting parties" smile; and if you want to see the shock of airPods Pro turning out to be the world again in the category of headphones, which is not fast, I am afraid that more patience is needed.
Regardless of the cost, death to health
No matter what direction of the past, almost all manufacturers have chosen to increase health in 2021, and there are many health-related functional improvements on the product side. Huawei and OPPO have promoted their own sports health labs this year, both of which have reached the scale of hundreds of people and enjoy independent office space and team operation authority.
At the functional level, blood oxygen detection has become a fairly common function on wearable products within a thousand yuan in just one year, and ECG has spread to become the standard of many brand flagship products. Since the OPPO Watch ECG version, smart watches that support this function can pass the medical device registration certification of the Food and Drug Administration, and medical institutions have not yet widely recognized the monitoring data, but it has finally taken a key step.
Apple smart watch can land ECG in The country is to give the confidence of the whole industry to follow up, after the relevant watch end mobile phone software function was approved, ECG from the end of 2021 in the domestic Apple Watch officially enabled. It is believed that in the future, more manufacturers will launch wearable products that support ECG, and even bring them to become common specifications within 2,000 yuan.
Samsung's experiment is quite interesting, with the integration of body composition sensors in two side buttons, which can quickly analyze indicators such as body fat percentage and body moisture like a body fat scale. This is a vertical function that sports and fitness enthusiasts may like, and it no longer needs to be weighed specifically to understand the results in time, but for the average user, it is still important to use a separate body fat scale to understand information such as weight.
However, the domestic market still lacks medical institutions and software services with health functions, and more investment must be made to help users live more efficiently and healthily. With the increase in the threshold for providing high-quality sports and health services, small and medium-sized manufacturers and third-party services may have a significant generation gap with large factories, forming a situation in which large manufacturers explore, define functions and experiences, and then the whole industry follows up to reduce costs.
With more device support, the future of independent communication is uncertain
The sports health function of wearable devices has gradually improved, and intelligent functions such as social, navigation, music, and personal assistants have also been added, which makes high-end products such as smart watches have sufficient independent use needs, rather than having to connect mobile phones as accessories to use. From the results, the number of wearable devices that support independent communication capabilities will increase significantly in 2021, and there is a trend towards the mainstream.
In addition to the usual introduction of a cellular version of the Apple Watch, a large number of high-end smart watches have begun to provide independent communication capabilities, and even different model versions are equipped with eSIM support as standard. This is more obvious in the products launched by mobile phone manufacturers, OPPO Watch 2, HUAWEI WATCH 3, vivo WATCH 2 product technology solutions are different, but can communicate independently.
Manufacturers have outlined a good prospect for independent communication, users will not have to check the mobile phone when they are out for a short time or focus on sports and fitness, and they can complete light tasks through smart watches. However, the necessary links such as high-quality wireless headset connectivity and rich and powerful application service ecology are still castles in the air for most wearable manufacturers, and they need to build an experience that matches the hardware specifications.
Children's wearable products that are not so strict in size and weight are much more relaxed, and products from early 100 yuan to thousands of yuan support independent communication, and are physical SIM cards rather than eSIM that are more cumbersome to manage and process. The biggest dividend from communication capabilities is that parents can grasp the location and safety of their children at the first time, but the new Internet privacy regulations implemented this year bring more challenges.
The smart pension with children in the scene is the direction in which independent communication wearable devices can play their strengths, and although the idea is good, there are still many problems that lack clear solutions: how to establish an easy-to-learn and easy-to-use experience for the elderly on the watch, how to be more efficient in large-scale promotion, and how to have a more detailed combination with the smart pension trend. Until you find the answer, it can only be a locator and a wrist phone.
Big screen, say goodbye to the bracelet era
Two events that are still important to today's wearable field came to the market in 2014, the Apple Watch and the Xiaomi bracelet, the former defining at least what qualities a good smart watch should have, and the latter showing how big a dojo can be built in a low-cost screw shell. In the years that followed, the two series remained the lead products in their respective categories.
The Xiaomi Bracelet 6 released in the spring is both happy and worrying: the joy is that it is in the 200 yuan price segment of less than one-tenth of the price of apple Watch, it is still the most fully functional product, and the worry is that compared with the previous generation of products, it can be said that there is almost no change, and it lacks the motivation to let old users replace new products. This may indicate that the smart bracelet form has developed to the top, and the market potential is running out.
Fortunately, manufacturers have long foreseen the bottleneck and directly taken action on the screen - in simple terms, smart watch products no longer only have a small-size screen with a long bar, but boldly expand the display area to the horizontal development in order to carry more functions and interactions. This makes Redmi watches, Huawei bracelets 6 and so on look more like watches, and it is precisely their self-redemption that they have completed.
The screen display area has increased significantly, but the price has stabilized at the price of three or four hundred yuan, which makes it easy for users to get a similar experience to smartwatch products. More like the personalized dial of traditional watches, the more comfortable look and feel of the functional experience, have come to a lower price segment, which is the use of embedded systems to improve the battery life of smart watches have not been able to do.
As a result, the connection between products at different price points has also become smooth: all products have message notifications, health monitoring, sports records, mobile payment and long endurance, but one or two hundred yuan can buy a small bracelet, three or four hundred yuan can buy an entry-level watch with a large enough screen, and within a thousand yuan can get a good design and texture, and two thousand yuan and above is the field of intelligent systems.
The "Ice Age" is coming, quietly waiting for the outbreak
Through the various changes in functions and product forms, we can find that there is a slightly dull air floating above the wearable field, which is not as optimistic as in the past few years, but it is not the opposite direction of the mobile phone market to turn to stock competition. Regardless of the price segment or brand volume of the product, everyone is holding their breath and waiting for the outbreak period to come.
This situation is not unrelated to the size of the market, but the slowdown in growth is only the result, and the reason is still from the direction of why consumers are reluctant to buy. The long-term charm of smartphones to attract consumers is that the experience and appearance can be updated significantly every year, which is exactly what wearable products lack: the functional changes are slow, and the appearance is similar.
2021 can be seen as a year of revival in the wearable field, and the industry is rearranging those who have real user value and can be exchanged for increased investment, such as fuller health monitoring capabilities and independent communication capabilities. At the same time, those features that are no longer suitable for wearability have begun to say goodbye to the mainstream market, and the number of products and sales are shrinking smart bracelets are just the beginning.
All the surviving third-party brands are groping for their trump cards, can use most of the functions without relying on mobile phones, and can get similar experiences on different brands of mobile phones. Only by surpassing the intelligent ecology defined by mobile phone manufacturers and playing a differentiation like "professional sports attributes" can we continue to write stories in this market.
Mobile phone manufacturers who master a large user pool are not at ease, and the difficulty of doing a good job of wearable products may not be much simpler than doing a good job of mobile phones, and it still requires a lot of research and development investment to do a good job. The "stars and moons" of other products sharing cakes on mobile phones has passed, and the next step is a new era of intelligent life in which each link of the whole ecological chain must be independent.