Apple has the Apple Watch and looks to launch the Apple Watch 2 this year, but there's a great demand for fitness bands in the market. Fitbit is one of the better-known names when it comes to fitness bands, and with affordable pricing for its fitness bands, the company makes a case for its presence in the wearables market. And yet, there are some companies such as Samsung that manufacture not only smartwatches but also smart fitness bands (Gear Fit, and now the Gear Fit2; Samsung has even made a fitness tracker called the Samsung Charm) that Apple has not yet provided an answer to. The company has only manufactured smartwatches to date with a starting price tag of $349 for the Apple Watch Sport model (the entry-level model), but a new report says that Apple is planning to release a "killer device" in 2017.
The report doesn't specify what that "killer device" will be, but Apple CEO Tim Cook has provided some insight on what it could be (a slight hint, anyway):
We don't want to put the watch through the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) process. I wouldn't mind putting something adjacent to the watch through it, but not the watch, because it would hold us back from innovating too much, the cycles are too long. But you can begin to envision other things that might be adjacent to it -- maybe an app, maybe something else.
Tim Cook says that an app could be responsible, but the item in question could also be "something adjacent to the watch" -- referring to the possibility of a fitness tracker or fitness band as well. The fact that the thing in question is called a "device" rules out an app, though the device could operate by way of an app (after all, most devices have an app by which you can transfer your health information to your phone and vice versa). With most fitness bands and fitness trackers costing beneath that of entry-level smartwatches, Apple would be able to break into a more budget-friendly market and increase its worldwide sales.
Apple has already received something of a backlash from fitness tracker maker Fitbit, who says that Apple has proceeded all wrong in the wearables market with its first-gen. smartwatch.
This device won't arrive until next year, but something says that the "killer device" phrase is marketing hype more than reality. The same thing was said about the Apple Watch prior to its release, but Apple released the smartwatch at a time in which nearly most of, if not all, its high-end rivals already had one or more on the market.
