The Apple Watch is going to be a flop, says top startup investor

Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson is known for having backed huge companies like Twitter, Zynga, and indeed at very early stages.

Today, he posted a series of predictions for 2015.

One of them is that Apple’s first new product line in years, the Apple Watch, is going to be a flop.

Wilson writes, “Another market where the reality will not live up to the hype is wearables. The Apple Watch will not be the home-run product that iPod, iPhone, and iPad have been.”

“Not everyone will want to wear a computer on their wrist. Eventually, this market will be realised as the personal mesh/personal cloud, but the focus on wearables will be a bit of a head-fake and take up a lot of time, energy, and money in 2015 with not a lot of results.”

Despite his pessimism for the Apple Watch, Wilson thinks Apple stock will remain attractive to investors in 2015.

“Capital markets will be a mixed bag in 2015. Big tech names will continue to access capital easily, but the combination of rising rates and depressed prices for oil will bring great stress to global capital markets and there will be a noticeable flight to safety around the world. Safety used to mean gold, US treasuries, and blue chip stocks. Now it means Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook.”