The great Apple Watch hoax: does the large Sport Edition even exist?

By Will Stabley | April 25, 2015

The Apple Watch launched today, or at least Apple is claiming as much. But those who placed a preorder for the large Sport Edition are crying foul and claiming otherwise, as even those who placed their order just seconds after apple.com started taking orders are being told that their watch won’t arrive for another month or more. That means Apple took orders for the large Sport at a time when it had manufactured zero units, and presumably knew it would still have zero inventory on “launch” day, meaning that the model is more or less a hoax. It’s the latest gaffe in a long lone of Apple Watch launch mistakes this month. But will it end up hurting the product’s popularity.

The public has been drawn to the Apple Watch because it offers a feature set sophisticated and refined enough to make competing smartwatches look like geek tinker toys. One million people placed preorders within a six hour period, ensuring that Apple will become the first tech vendor to launch a mainstream-successful wearable computing product. But problems immediately surfaced, not with the product itself, but with how the launch was handled.

Those who wanted to place a preorder were required to do so without being able to visit an Apple Store first to get a fitting and find out whether the large or small model would fit them better, and were left to guess when they placed their orders. They were then encouraged to come into the store after the fact so they could try on a demo unit of the watch they had already ordered, so they could find out whether it happened to fit them. But for those who had guessed wrong, changing their order would have pushed them further back into the queue, forcing them to wait an extra month or more.

Now it turns out that while the small Apple Watch model appears to be shipping in quantity today, literally zero of the large Apple Watch, or at least zero of the large Sport Edition, have shipped – and according to ongoing estimates, none will until the second half of May. That means those who guessed “large” when placing their preorder will have to wait another month or more, whereas if they had guessed “small” instead they could have received their order today. Apple did nothing to inform those ordering the large model that it would show up a month later than the small model.

Apple has launched products in the past where one of more of the variants was available in more limited quantities than the other. But in instances where it knew it would have literally zero inventory of a particular model to offer, they made this information clear in advance. In this instance Apple more or less pretended to have all Watch variants launch on the same day. So even as those who stayed up until three in the morning to be the first to place an online preorder are stuck waiting until May or even June to receive theirs, even as those who placed their (small model) order the next day are receiving theirs now. Of course all of this could have been avoided if Apple had allowed for in-store try-ons before opening up online preorders.

The fiasco is enough to force Apple to reevaluate every aspect of its product launches, from preorders, to in-store visits, to inventory levels, to what defines a “launch” date. In the end, the Apple Watch is such a strong product that it should succeed regardless of how much of a Seinfeldian fiasco this launch has almost inexplicably turned into. But for now, one of the most exciting new products in the Jobs-Cook era has been treated to easily the most bungled launch of the Jobs-Cook era.