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The Apple Watch Series 7 and SE were the world's best-selling smartwatches in Q1

By Joshua Swingle

Published: Jun 12, 2022, 9:53 AM

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Apple Wearables

The Apple Watch Series 7 and SE were the world's best-selling smartwatches in Q1

Apple already has the world’s best-selling smartphone, tablet, wireless earbuds, and smart speaker for Q1 2022. Now, new data reveals that the company also occupies the top spot in the lucrative smartwatch market.

The Apple Watch Series 7 is the best-selling smartwatch worldwide

Analyst Francisco Jeronimo has shared a small infographic about the world’s most popular smartwatches in the first quarter of the year, and to no one’s surprise, Apple absolutely dominated the rankings. The Apple Watch Series 7, the brand’s most expensive smartwatch with a starting price of $399 in the United States, became the world’s best-selling smartwatch between January and March 2022.

Early rumors had pointed to a complete redesign involving flat edges, but the final Apple Watch Series 7 design represented a modest change over the Series 6, pairing the same overall look with a larger screen and thinner bezels.

As the best-selling smartwatch list indicates, though, that lack of change doesn’t appear to have hampered demand. In fact, Apple’s position in the smartwatch market remains extremely solid.

The Apple Watch SE continues to perform well despite its age

The world’s second most popular smartwatch in the first quarter was… Drum roll, please… Another Apple Watch! The Apple Watch SE is fast approaching its second anniversary, but its $279 price point has kept customers interested. The model offers the gorgeous design of the Apple Watch Series 4-6 but without some of the premium features like ECG support. For most customers, it’s more than enough, hence its popularity.

Sales should remain stable over the coming months as there have been few launches from rivals as of late, but sales of the current-gen Watch SE are set to end come September when Apple launches a second-gen version. Details about what that device will include are scarce, although it’ll most likely offer the same design as the current model backed with a faster chipset and some extra features thrown in here and there.

The Series 3 is also a best-seller, but Apple's dropping support

While the Apple Watch Series 7 and Watch SE contributed the bulk of Apple’s smartwatch sales, the cheaper (and much older) Series 3 ultimately helped push the brand’s market share to an outstanding 51.2% in Q1 2022.

The Apple Watch Series 3 retails at $199 and was originally launched in 2017. The fact that it’s almost five years old means that it’s rarely recommended these days, but it was still popular enough to become the fifth best-selling smartwatch worldwide.

However, the Series 3 is nearing the end of its life. Despite still being on sale, Apple won’t be supporting it beyond watchOS 8. It won’t receive the watchOS 9 features announced this week and will almost certainly be discontinued in September.

Samsung was the only other brand to place smartwatches in the top 5

What about those other two spots in the top 5 smartwatch list? Well, those belong to the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 and Watch 4 Classic — the company’s first watches running Google’s upgraded Wear OS platform. These two smartwatches were popular enough to secure a combined 18.9% market share for Samsung, representing strong growth over Q1 2020 when the brand was still shipping Tizen-powered smartwatches.

It’s clear from the latest market data that Samsung made the right decision in replacing Tizen with Wear OS. And with the company now working on the next-generation Galaxy Watch 5 and Watch 5 Pro, this momentum should continue into the second half of 2022 and beyond.

Behind Samsung in terms of total sales with Garmin, with a market share of 7.2%, and Huawei, with a share of 4.5%. Google-owned Fitbit occupied fifth place overall with a 3.6% share, though it’ll be interesting to see how this evolves once the Pixel Watch hits shelves this autumn.