What Tim said about Apple Watch sales

During Apple’s earnings call yesterday, Tim Cook carved out a section of his presentation to address Apple Watch sales numbers.

A little parsing:

Sales of the watch did exceed our expectations, and they did so despite supply still trailing demand at the end of the quarter.

That’s referring to Apple constraining sales to online-only, long shipping dates, not being able to make enough Apple Watches to meet demand.

To give you a little additional insight, through the end of the quarter, in fact the Apple Watch sell-through was higher than the comparable of the launch periods of the original iPhone or the original iPad.

This post elaborates on this point. Apple Watch numbers, at this point in the product lifecycle, are better than iPhone sales, better than the original iPad sales, at the same point in those lifecycles.

We were able to do that with having only 680 points of sale, and as you probably know, as I had reviewed earlier, the online sales were so great at the beginning, we were not able to feed inventory to our stores until mid June, and so those points of sale pretty much the overwhelming of the low numbers of sales were not there until the last two weeks of the quarter.

Sales didn’t rollout to stores until there were only two weeks left in the quarter. This doesn’t mean that the next quarter sales will be off the charts. It’s still early in the adoption cycle and watchOS 2 is still in beta. Only time will tell us how successful Apple Watch will be in the long run.

But Tim followed with this point:

Most importantly of all of this, is the customer sat is off the charts. Because we’ve constantly seen that if you can get the customer sat off the charts you can wind up doing fairly well over time.

The “customer sat” refers to existing customer satisfaction with the product. With a sat of 97%, it’s clear that people who own an Apple Watch love their Apple Watch. And that is a huge point. If anything is a predictor of future success, tremendous user satisfaction is that predictor.

[Transcript via Six Colors]