Apple Watch Isn’t Clicking With Millennials

Millennials are enthusiastic about getting HBO Now from Apple. The Apple Watch? Not so much. At least that’s according to an analysis of more than 700,000 tweets during last Monday’s big Apple event, Re/code reported.

Those under age 35 were twice as likely to tweet about Apple’s HBO Now and Apple TV announcements as the average person tweeting about the event, according to the study by social media research service Fizziology. Meanwhile, those in the 35-to-49 age range were twice as likely to be tweeting about the headline attraction, the Apple Watch.

The millennial group “is a generation that loves their TV but they don’t want to consume it in traditional ways,” Fizziology president Ben Carlson told Re/code. “I think the announcement by Apple really spoke to them — the lower price point on Apple TV, the near immediate availability of HBO Now.”

In fact, 16 percent of the tweets overall were negative, with complaints about the Watch’s price and the fact that it would be a conspicuous display of the owner’s social status.

But older consumers are more likely to be in the market for the Watch, which ranges in price from $349 to $17,000, Carlson said. And 38 percent of the tweets were strongly positive, many of them calling out capabilities they liked, such as a Starwood Hotels app for the Watch that allows keyless entry to a hotel room.

There was also a gender split in the tweets: Tweets from men outnumbered those from women by a 69 to 31 percent margin. While both men and women tweeted about the Apple Watch and the new MacBook Pro, women were more likely to discuss news that Apple TV was dropping in price from $99 to $69, while men were more inclined to talk about ResearchKit, the health-data software that Apple also announced.

But making sense of the instant reaction Twitter provides is tricky, Carlson cautioned. When the iPad was unveiled in 2010, tweets were more negative than they were for the Apple Watch, with tweeters making fun of the name and questioning what it was good for. People must have found something to do with it: Apple has sold a quarter-billion iPads in the past five years.