GoPro patent: Apple Watch is just first wearable computer, but…

By Will Stabley | January 15, 2015

Apple has been granted a patent for a wearable video camera product, which has investors in the industry leader GoPro nervous. After all, Cupertino is about to unleash the Apple Watch on the market, and it will be just the first of several wearable computing products from the company. But those expecting Apple to offer a video camera product any time soon shouldn’t necessarily hold their breath.

The GoPro HERO is a good product, and with some tweaks to its still-evolving interface, could end up being a great one. Action video cameras as a quickly growing niche that has helped take some of the sting out of the fact that most people have already traded in their general purpose digital cameras and camcorders in for a smartphone with camera capabilities. If Apple were to enter the market, it could likely deliver a superior product from day one. And because the GoPro is a three hundred dollar product to begin with, Apple doesn’t have to worry about the profit pressure from a race to the bottom in a low-margin market like it’s currently facing from, say, budget tablets.

But just because Apple filed a patent for such a product, and apparently offered enough specific detail on its potential plans so as to get that patent approved, it doesn’t mean the company will go there. Tech companies file patents for pretty much every new product or technology they come up with, just in case they want to launch it later. The real question is whether Apple wants to enter a market which, based on GoPro’s current revenue, may not be worth tapping into unless it’s likely to grow orders of magnitude larger over the next few years. And that’s still an open question.

Then again, smart watches are an unproven market as well, and Apple is going full stream ahead with the Apple Watch. But Cupertino knows that there is at least the strong potential for computer watches to become a mainstream product to the point that most consumers will decide they want one, while there are far fewer people who are likely to decide that they suddenly need a camcorder than can do video than what their iPhone can do.

In other words Apple, which prefers to enter markets carefully and usually one at a time, has to weigh the potential of a GoPro-like product over several other wearable possibilities, from smart glasses on down. The patent says that Apple is at least weighing its options. But it doesn’t signify anything just yet.