• Home
  • Trends
  • Company News
  • Product News
  • Fashion
  • Podcast
  • Events
  • About
  • Contact
  • May 21, 2025

Wearable Tech Insider

The Inside Word on Wearables and Wearable Technology

You are here: Home / General News / Wearables in 2014: The Year It Didn’t Ship

Wearables in 2014: The Year It Didn’t Ship

December 30, 2014 By Dan Rosenbaum

Gartner's 2014 Hype Cycle
Gartner’s 2014 Hype Cycle

Back in February, at a Mobile World Congress session about wearables, one of the panelists made the key observation of the year:

“Hardware is hard.”

Is it ever. Anyone can pull together a Photoshop drawing, build a 3D printed gadget and make a YouTube video. Anyone can get on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, and anyone can hire a PR company. Building it and shipping something? That’s hard. Real hard.

Hardware is hard enough that the biggest companies had trouble with it this year. Fitbit suffered the financial and reputational embarrassment of pulling a product at the beginning of the year, and then couldn’t get two successors out the door by the holiday season. (It didn’t seem to hurt them much; they’re still the industry leader in the smartband market by a wide margin.) Jawbone missed the holiday with the UP24. Apple — well, we all know about the Apple Watch, although Apple never claimed they were going to ship this year anyway.

Google Glass? Nope.

Healbe Gobe? Despite its president swearing up and down that it would ship in the summer and then the fall — nothing. (And never mind that its central health claims still appear to be nonsense.)

The Intel/Opening Ceremony MICA cuff? No. Will.i.am’s PULS? Sadly, no.

Drum Pants? No. Skully Helmets? No.

It’s not all grim. Zackees shipped. And so did Visijax, a waycool LED-enhanced bicycling jacket that we’ve done some marketing consulting for.

On the good side, of course, things did ship, although often in limited quantities. Samsung came to shelves with a long line of wristware. Misfit segmented the market nicely by price and design. Lumo shipped its posture monitor. Sensoria’s socks made it to backers (we think). Moto360 came out as expected, as did the Withings Activé and a lovely Michael Bastian smartwatch. And the enterprise wearables business continues to percolate. So it wasn’t all grim.

Hardware is hard and unforgiving. Designers have to make product decisions based on technology targets that are faint and moving away from them. Managing a manufacturing process that’s 10,000 miles away in China is difficult. Keeping impatient investors in line is tricky. Too often, one way to keep heat on a project is to feed an all-too-compliant and competitive media, trying to make it look like a product is actually real, instead of some digital files, extended credit lines, and a stomach full of acid.

For our part, we tried to separate Kickstarter campaign hype from the actual product. We got better at it as the year went by, but we as snarky as we are, we were credulous too often. We can do still better. And that’s why we’re not naming Products of the Year this year; it’s too hard to separate real products from sort-of products.

The good news? There’s lots of great stuff in the pipeline, and hope springs eternal. From here, it looks like there’s gonna be a hell of a first quarter 2015…

Last updated by Dan Rosenbaum on February 1, 2017.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Email

Related

Filed Under: General News, Trends Tagged With: year-ender

← 2014 In Review: Top Stories by Traffic Wearables in 2014: Nine Top Stories of the Year →

Recent Posts

New Use Case for Apple Watch: Red Sox Stealing Signs

Fossil Debuts Two Android Wear Smartwatches

Garmin Shows Three New Fitness Bands at IFA

Fitbit Ionic: Minimal Acceptable Product?

Intel (Finally) Ditches Wearables for AR

Don’t Believe Everything You Read: Wearables Are Far From Dead

Eyes F.lashing Before Your Life

Smarty Pants: Nadi X Yoga Leggings

Rings: How Smart Can They Be?

Upskill Closes Series B Financing, But Won’t Say How Much

Stories from Health Tech Insider

  • Remote Monitoring Drives New Personalized Treatment for Chronic Breathing Problems
  • Wearable Technology Listens for Knee Damage [video]
  • New Bandages Promise Faster Healing for Stubborn Wounds
  • CVS Acquires Telehealth Service to Bring Healthcare to the Home
  • Masimo’s New Smartwatch Addresses Privacy Concerns
  • Continuous Real-Time Diagnostics On the Go [video]

Topics

2013 android android wear apple apple watch apx labs basis battery CES ces2016 CES2017 epson finance fitbit fitness fossil fuelband garmin gear glass google healthkit intel iWatch jawbone LG market research microsoft misfit MWC15 nfc nike omate omsignal pebble recon samsung smartwatch sony sports tizen vuzix withings wristware wristwear

Copyright 2016 Center Ring Media | Site by JRMC